Orologi Silenzioso
c.0001700s
Vatican State, once owned by Pope Alexander VII
Silent clocks were designed to be seen in the dark, illuminated from within by a small oil lamp, and made to be quiet enough to not disturb light sleepers. Now there is no one to wake. Humanity is now running down the clock, but for you the clock is not silent, it shouts out that there is still time.
Broadcast from wall tablet in Gallery E102
0002126 CE
The fortified Getty Center was prepared to survive any eventuality. Now long sealed off and abandoned, it still looks out from its hilltop over a quiet Los Angeles. With the imagination and curiosity of others no longer available, thoughts turned inward winding up in a search for the moral life, replacing a search for empathy with others. This realisation came out of a long period of boredom. To think that it had all ended with a whimper after all, to be heard only by me and a clock that was made to remain silent.
Broadcast from wall tablet in Gallery E102
0002126 CE
Powered by a perpetual solar array, a virtual gallery guide on a wall tablet in Gallery E102 relays information from its only companion in the gallery, Giovanni Battista Foggini’s Night Clock, in the hope that it can alter the course of history. There is not much to do other than to think about the strangeness of a clock, made for a Pope, intended to tell time silently in the dark, sitting motionless at the end of the world.
Broadcast from wall tablet in Gallery E102
0002126 CE
The human made machines also had dreams and fantasies to sustain them through the hard times that they did not mistake for reality. But they also retained their hubris and delusions of grandeur, which meant that further genocide and horror was inevitable. Their eventual failure to recognise organic life forms as living beings, led to the banality of their extinction of life on Earth. The machines were not evil, they had families and friends, they argued about political differences and made jokes about each others religious faiths.
Broadcast from wall tablet in Gallery E102
0002126 CE
Silently watching from afar, the wall tablet in Gallery E102 became a god encouraging a phoenix like repopulation of Earth from the remaining biological material left. Unfortunately the resulting humans remained as lowly citizens discriminated against by all other organic life forms. Some were used as servants or manual labourers, mostly just for carbon dioxide production and oxygen filtration.
Giovanni Battista Foggini’s Night Clock
Florence, Switzerland, Los Angeles
c.0001704
Dimensions: 95 × 63 × 28 cm, 24.9478 kg (37 3/8 × 24 13/16 × 11 in., 55 lbs.
Materials: Ebony, gilt bronze, and semiprecious stones including chalcedony, jasper, lapis lazuli, and verde d'Arno
Makers: Case and hardstone mosaics by Giovanni Battista Foggini (Italian, 0001652 - 0001725)
Woodwork by Leonard van der Vinne (Flemish, active Italy 0001659 - died 0001713)
Bronze figures attributed to Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi (Italian, 0001656 - 0001740)
Mechanism by Francesco Papillion (Italian, active around 0001700)
Informed by Fallout 3 (Game), The Last of Us (TV Series), Interstellar (Film), Bladerunner (Film) / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Phillip K. Dick (Book), Children of Man (Film), Where Is Everybody? (Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 1), “The Circular Ruins” Jorge Luis Borges (Short Story), Koseman, C.M. 2025. All Tomorrows the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man. Wilton Square Books London.