Take Your Time.
 April 30, 2004 One of the most pleasant places to be is in a moving train. The window frames the landscape as the train meanders toward its destination. I am both progressing to a new location and drifting in and out of focus from the passing imagery to my own thoughts. |
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While living in New Haven, I find this feeling of freedom is tempered by my wait at Union Station. The station is over-shadowed by the information board: a list of data that controls our anxiety level with every turn of the letters. It represents a meta-reality, disconnected from what is actually happening out on the tracks.
Although being on the train and waiting in the station are both waiting, they represent the difference between event time and clock time. The New Yorker explains event time and clock time in describing Ecuador’s national movement to make its populace more punctual;1 as the president demonstrates here. Event time refers to an attitude that “things happen when they happen.” It is more free, but less productive than clock time. Clock time is when exact times organize people and events. |
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The tradition of train travel is as based on event time as clock time. Although a train is to arrive at a certain time; ultimately when it comes, it comes. And the tradition of being outside next to the tracks, provides the consolation that when the train shows up, you just get on it.
Clock time is at the center of our sped up society. The spread of clocks in the 19th-century linked people together with great efficiency but also synchronized our activities to those of machines. The information board is a prediction of what is to come, but it is not reality. The reality of train travel exists outside, in the movement of the train. The information board disguises this reality, while adding the anxiety of being far enough from the tracks to fear missing the train. |
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If one wants to wait outside at Union Station, there are no benches, and no way to receive updates on the trains. If one is to venture outside, to pursue the age-old tradition of waiting for a train, he must wait in good faith, assuming the train is coming on schedule. This anxiety is too much to bear, and keeps many inside, glued to the board. Whereas the inside offers all of the necessities for those who wish to follow the clock, the outside should offer its counterpart: a more event-driven view of the train.
The relationship to the outside and travel reminds me of a flight I took on Japan Airlines. As we were waiting to take off, the pilot alerted us to two special television channels. One station showed video footage of a camera pointing down from the plane, the other station showed video feed from a camera pointing forward. When we began to move, I got a sense of our speed from the camera. And when we were airborne, the ground slowly pulled away. Subtle changes in direction would open up a new landscape or cropping of the horizon. |
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I am proposing a project which, like Japan Airlines, uses live video from the moving vehicle. But unlike the video onboard Japan Airlines, it is for those waiting for the train not for those already on it.
The site for the project is on the end of each platform at the station. The end of the platform is used as storage. The video from the train would be used to make a three-monitor clock that shows time in a relative way. |
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The familiar units of hours, minutes and seconds are each represented with a monitor. The image in the hour screen would update with an image from the side of the expected train every hour. The image in the minutes screen would update every minute, and the image in the seconds screen would update every second. Together, they form a picture of the speed of the train (if any) and its landscape.
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The images represent what we see when we’re on the train. It is a view that offers consolation and the freedom to relax. The train is coming, visible by the change in distance from second to second. And whether or not someone truly engages in the imagery, its rhythm provides the scenery from the view of being already on board. The anxiety of a clock turns into a reality-based indi-cator of time so the positive effects of waiting can begin long before the train actually arrives. |
 . . . See a simulation of the project . . . |
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References 1 Surowiecki, James. “Punctuality Pays.” The New Yorker. 5 Apr 2004, p31. |
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Master's Thesis,
Yale University
. . .
John Caserta