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ARRIVAL TIME – DEPARTURE TIME, 2008 (in progress)
 CITY OF CALGARY, CANADA.
7th Ave. Block E Light Rail Transit Station Artwork

SITE CONSIDERATION
There is nothing stationary about a station. Whether we are arriving or departing, we are only there in order to get somewhere else. Still, under the canopy of a station, we do share brief moments together flowing in and out of each other’s lives as perfect strangers. We are well adapted to this in-between space of no-one’s land, but at the same time, it is everyone’s land, a civic space.
Many of us see our own existences in this world also as a sort of arrival and departure. But in this World Station, we know not where we arrived from or will depart to. Our reality is confined within this one Station only. While it is important for a light rail station to have a schedule for its passengers, the World Station in contrast, has an open schedule that allows for endless serendipitous and purposeful events to occur.

ARTWORK
Clock keeps a station’s heart beating in schedule. We are creating a set of nine stainless steel clocks hung from the station canopy’s supporting beams. Each clock will have a custom designed movement that tells the intimate and underappreciated time of our human heartbeats in place of the 60 seconds per minute standard. Heart is the first nature timepiece that we are all born with. It began pulsing in us during our fouth Week as fetuses, and evolves as we develop and age, then it will eventually stop.

ARRIVAL TIME, DEPARTURE TIME
Each of our nine clocks will tick in a designated rhythm that is calibrated to one particular biological age of our beating hearts. Starting with the clock of our arrival time as fetus, installed at the East end of the canopy, where the trams arrive. And ends with our old age clock at the west end, where the trams depart.

OBJECTIVE
Our goal is to create a symphony of the human hearts from arrival to departure. Through this artwork, commuters can join us in exploring our first nature time keeping, slowly identifying ones own heartbeat with one of these clocks, and so on towards an open meditation on our arrival and departure under the Block E. Station Canopy that is also a part of our World Station.