Centuries of the Bristlecone is an artwork by philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art in partnership with The Long Now Foundation. A decade in the making and launched this year, the piece has two components: a monumental arboreal clock built in collaboration with clockmakers Phil Abernethy and Brittany Nicole Cox, and a land art installation sited at Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, home to the world's longest-living trees.
Up among the high mountains of the American West, the world’s longest-living trees can be found. The bristlecone pine trees of the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin grow at glacial paces and die even more slowly; at their longest-observed lifespan, they can withstand almost five millennia of harsh alpine conditions. Their internal growth, as measured by their rings, does not follow the rigid, unwavering rhythm of clock time. Instead, it speeds and slows in response to changing environmental stimuli, recording in the very structures of these trees the ecological history through which they live.
In Centuries of the Bristlecone, Jonathon Keats asks: What would it mean to live in bristlecone time?
The stunning 11-foot dual pendulum clock on display at the Nevada Museum of Art was created in collaboration with master clockmakers Phil Abernethy and Brittany Nicole Cox. The clock has two faces: one shows the conventional, regimented rhythm of Coordinated Universal Time that rules our lives today; the other displays the fluid, irregular cadence of what Keats calls “bristlecone time.” Bristlecone time is calibrated to the annual growth of Bristlecone pine trees living at 11,000 feet on Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, high atop Mount Washington in Eastern Nevada’s Snake Range.
The Preserve is also host to the land art component of the piece. During visits over the last 10 years, Keats selected four bristlecones which together will serve as an arboreal calendar for the next five millennia. Each tree has been arrayed with several brass survey markers. These are stamped with dates indicating the girth the bristlecone can be expected to have in 500 years, 1,000 years, and more, as extrapolated from historical tree growth for Mount Washington bristlecones.
Keats expects growth to naturally deviate from these expectations. Fluctuations in microclimates on the mountain, natural irregularity due to the harshness of the alpine environment, and of course the impact of global climate change will all have unpredictable effects.
“These uncertainties are integral to the concept,” Keats writes. “In these calendars, time is alive with contingencies. Through these calendars, we’ll come to terms with where prediction fails us: the limitations of what we can know about the future, and the threat of hubris.”
Keats’ prior work has found ways both playful and provocative to reintegrate nature into human systems. In New York City, he once screened travel documentaries featuring European skies for houseplants to experience by photosynthesis. At Hampshire College, he oversaw the appointment of slime molds as visiting nonhuman scholars, and distributed their policy advice to government agencies. With Centuries of the Bristlecone, Keats reminds us how nature provided our primary orientation to time before the advent of atomic clocks and the Gregorian calendar. “In pre-Classical Greece, time was kept by cicadas’ songs, the flowering of artichokes, and the migration of cranes,” Keats writes. Bristlecone time provides “an alternative to Gregorian time by bringing the calendar back to life.”
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