tiwalkme
If fresh world views are stimulated by art, while humans are blind to the lessons of history, then perhaps art remains our best hope to
make
time
itself
visible.
tangible
emotional.
People measure time in heart beats or seasons or long boring waits in line. But time scales of generations or millennia exist outside the realm of human experience and intuition.
So for most of us, the Grand Canyon merely exposes a colorful scar torn through the desert, leaving us mute to its graceful struggle with wind and water over the eons. We cannot see the patient weathering of rock into pastel striae. We cannot hear the cleaving of a DNA helix, triggering the birth of a new species when the canyon was young.
And thus doubt reality. Simply because we confuse the slow and steady, with the static and improbable.
Yet our species must develop a long-term perspective. That’s how we hold the earth in trust for generations upon generations. That’s how we appreciate the lessons of the past, avoiding the next war or the harm sprung from casual prejudice
Making time Deep Time visible and tangible is the purpose of TiWalkMe.
Unlike conventional parks filled with fields, playgrounds and foliage, TiWalkMe is designed as a living clock ticking out a thousand years. Every year, a row of trees are planted in a line bisecting a meandering path. A thousand planting beds wait patiently to be filled. One for each year of a millennia. Annually, younger rows of trees planted back along the path grow a few feet taller. In a few decades, this ever-increasing wave of trees forms a forest, coursing from the past into the future. A living wave, moving across the landscape like a hand across a very ancient clock.
A thousand years takes the forest on a mile long odyssey. By walking the same millennia path, reading the history on each planting bed, people cannot help but appreciate the nature of deep time. Resetting their sound-bite view of the world.
Intertwined within the forest are buildings and paths linking business, educational and non-profit organizations together, enabling discourse and generating new insights. TiWalkMe is an icon. A tourist destination. A venue for important meetings among world leaders. An inspiration, crossing political boundaries. A lasting purpose for a city, and a bastion to survive economic and social turbulence.
2001-ongoing