Weather and Clocks — Always-On Canvases the Signage Was Built For

Xinzhuang station, on the southern edge of Shanghai, is where Metro lines 1 and 5 cross. Pass through the ticket gates and follow the connecting corridor toward the bus terminal. Along its wall, after dark, particles begin to fall — one grain per second, faintly greenish-white, holding their distance from one another as if obeying a simple law of attraction and repulsion. The cloud reorganises itself until, eventually, it resolves into enormous numerals: the current hour and minute. The piece is time++, by Raven Kwok, permanently installed since December 2019 on the wall of the Todtown (Xinzhuang Integrated Transport Hub) complex. A commuter coming off the late shift glances at it to read 21:00. Someone hurrying for the last bus reads 22:58. They use it as a clock. At the same moment, they are also looking at it as an artwork.

This essay is filed under kei: 候 (KŌ) — the climate-and-atmosphere lens. The conceit of the lens is that some artworks do not occupy a time slot inside a programme; they occupy weather and the hour itself. We want to argue that signage clocks and signage weather works are not adjacent genres but twins, born of the same underlying condition: the screen that never closes.

To ask why a piece like time++ can exist at all is to arrive at the nature of signage itself. A museum's gallery closes at six. A film, a concert, a play — each runs for a finite duration, opens and ends. Signage, almost without exception, does not. It runs twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. For the advertiser, the value of a screen consists precisely in this un-closability. In airports, stations, malls, along the street, the screen's continuing presence is what the screen is for.

Within the history of digital art there are two lineages that take this condition head-on as their subject. One is the clock. The other is weather. Both are things human beings looked at, long before urban signage existed, to confirm the update of the present moment: the platform clock at the station, the radio time signal, the weather map on the evening news. Signage inherits that role and then expands it, by orders of magnitude, in expressive freedom. What we want to do here is read these two lineages as a single lineage — twins of the always-on canvas.

When a Clock Becomes the Subject of a Screen

The modern reference point for clock-as-artwork is Christian Marclay's The Clock, first shown at White Cube, London in 2010. Marclay and his researchers cut nearly twelve thousand clock-bearing seconds from the histories of cinema and television and stitched them, across a full twenty-four hours, in exact synchrony with the time on your wrist. The work toured MoMA, Tate, the Venice Biennale (where it took the Golden Lion in 2011), and continues to be screened in museums around the world. It is not a piece suited to permanent signage. But it is impossible to discuss this kei without it, because the architectural principle is here: the clock inside the screen agrees with the time outside the screen. The moment a screen becomes a clock, it intervenes directly in the lived time of its viewer.

Maarten Baas pulled that thinking out of the gallery and into the public concourse. Real Time, the Dutch designer's twelve-hour video series, shows a single performer behind a translucent screen, drawing and erasing the hands of a clock with a marker — for twelve hours, by hand, in absurdly literal labour. The most widely seen iteration, Schiphol Clock (2016), is a permanent fixture at the international terminal of Amsterdam Schiphol. Passengers waiting for a connecting flight watch a man in blue overalls forever redraw the minute hand. Signage as a medium and performance video as a medium converge here as cleanly as they have anywhere.

A different solution to the same problem comes from the hardware side. Humans Since 1982, a Swiss-Swedish studio, builds works from arrays of small programmable analogue clocks. Each hand can be steered independently; together, the hands describe enormous choreographies on the wall. Every hour, all hands fall into alignment and the array briefly reads as a true clock. In between, the hand-collective dances arabesques. The version installed in front of Terminal 1 Arrivals at Singapore Changi in 2018 — five hundred and four faces, A Million Times at Changi — is among the largest kinetic timepieces ever made. The conceit is neither video nor CG: a wall of independent mechanical clocks tells the time by synchronising. Read it as a physicalisation of the metaphor on which signage rests in the first place: a pixel is a tiny independent clock.

If one goes back to the history of the screen on the web, the precursor to screen-resident clock art is Yugo Nakamura's Industrious Clock (2001, tha ltd.). A white background, handwritten-style digits rewriting themselves once per second, implemented in Flash. The piece carried into early-2000s web design the assumption that the screen is always open — a premise the rest of the medium had not yet absorbed. The screensaver cultures of the late 2000s, and the "ambient video" slots of today's street signage, descend continuously from this small Flash loop.

The most recent layer in the genealogy belongs to generative art. Alexis André's 720 Minutes (2021), released on Ethereum via Art Blocks Curated, takes as its base unit the twelve hours, or seven hundred and twenty minutes, of the clock itself. What a collector owns is not a still image but a clock whose generative logic is unique to that holder — a particular way of living-as-a-clock. Because the NFT is paired with a display device, ownership and display can be detached: a private photo frame at home, a gallery monitor, a commercial-grade screen on the street, can all run the same clock. Within weeks of the Art Blocks release, in December 2021, André posted his own 720 Minutes, Live Shibuya version — a clock from Art Blocks running on a Shibuya streetscreen. The artist demonstrated, from the launch onward, that a generative NFT clock can spill out of the living room and onto public signage.

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Return now to Raven Kwok's time++. The work occupies the point where every line above intersects: Marclay's screen-as-clock, Baas's permanent installation in transit space, Nakamura's screen-resident loop, A Million Times's self-organising micro-elements, André's generative paradigm. Particles fall as seconds, regroup along distance thresholds, and continue to resolve two-digit hour and minute readings. In 2023 the system was redesigned as Time Left Shift 7, for "Moments in Åre" — a project by the Nordic outdoor brand Peak Performance with UCCA Lab, sited inside the Réel department store on West Nanjing Road, Shanghai. The clock displayed Swedish time (UTC+1) and rotated through a new colour palette every minute. Sound by 3ASiC. Scenography by Shen Ruofan.

What the time++ lineage demonstrates is not "a clock that happens to also be art." It is a different design proposition: the act of reading the time can itself be a painting that rewrites itself. The commuter who passes through the ticket gate and reads 21:12 receives, on a single screen, both a utility (the time) and an expressive gesture (a reinvention of how that time is written). Signage, time++ insists, is the place where the most foundational lexicon of public display — the clock — becomes editable.

When Weather Becomes the Subject of a Screen

Alongside the clock, the other subject signage is structurally well-suited to carry is weather. The atmosphere updates around the clock; its phase shifts with the seasons; the room for visualisation is, in theory, infinite.

The most widely cited modern origin for "artificial weather" is Olafur Eliasson's The Weather Project (2003–04), the giant half-sun projected in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, accompanied by a fine mist sprayed through the volume. Visitors lay on their backs on the floor and looked up at themselves, mirrored on the ceiling, alongside the artificial sun. That work was not signage and not a screen. But — as many reviewers have observed — it was the moment the editorial intent of bringing manufactured weather into public space was declared, and it set the trajectory for what followed in weather-art and weather-signage.

If we had to single out one canonical signage instance of weather-as-art, it would be Refik Anadol Studio's Wind of Boston: Data Paintings (2017–). A year of wind data — speed, direction, gust, temperature, sampled every twenty seconds — was collected at Boston Logan International Airport and rendered onto a 6 × 13-foot LED in the lobby of 100 Northern Avenue, on the Boston Seaport waterfront, in four "chapters": Hidden Landscapes, Porcelain Memories, Sea Breeze, Gust in the City. The screen runs daily from eight in the morning to eleven at night. Commuters cross the lobby on their way to work and see the day's wind as a painting.

Anadol's studio followed it with Bosphorus (2018–19), in which thirty days of radar observations of the Sea of Marmara were rendered, on a 12 × 3-metre LED media wall, as a moving topographic map of the sea surface. What the two works share is an editorial decision to translate weather data into the vocabulary of painting. Here too, signage is the place where the brush is taken up to handle the real-time observation.

At the opposite pole sits John Gerrard's Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) (2014): a 1:1 real-time 3D simulation, built in the Unigine game engine, of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada, all ten thousand heliostats included. A full 365-day cycle is encoded; heliostats rotate to track the sun's actual position; every sixty minutes the camera ascends from ground level toward orbital view. The piece entered the collections of LACMA (acquired in 2015 with funds donated by Leonardo DiCaprio) and MoMA. Strictly speaking, this is sun-tracking art rather than weather art — but the design principle, of a screen that runs continuously and replaces a working solar plant with itself rather than with a painting, sits squarely inside the always-on signage problem.

For weather × experiential scale, the largest crowd-drawing case in recent years is teamLab's Field of Wind, Rain and Sun (2024–) in Higashi-Osaka, opened in October 2024 on the site of a former printing factory at "Kan-Kan Factory: Meadow Café." Several works in the cluster react directly to the actual sky: Circle of Light at Noon casts a rainbow when the sun reaches its peak; Calligraphy in Wind and Light runs glyphs across the sky when the wind blows; Crystallised Moments of Rain replaces falling rain with falling light. It is not signage in any strict sense — it is an outdoor light installation. But the operating principle, weather as the trigger that drives the screen-or-light to run, is the mirror image of weather-on-signage and should be read alongside it.

Swing back to the signage pole. Outernet London's The Now Building at Tottenham Court Road station — the wraparound LED room, 23,000 square feet at 16K — installed Cem Hasimi × Outernet Studio's The Rain (music: Olivier van de Braak) as a permanent piece in 2025. The work translates rainfall into bursts of light and invites visitors to participate through a QR-code interface; the rain's behaviour adjusts according to who is participating. Where Anadol's gesture is "objective data visualised," The Rain is "weather-as-motif experientialised." Put the two side by side and the range that signage weather art has begun to span comes into view.

The Invention of Standing Up to Always-On

Look at the works listed above together and one thing emerges, however different their expressive vectors. None of them can exist unless the screen never goes off.

Clock art, obviously, loses its existence the moment the clock stops. Raven Kwok's particles in time++ acquire meaning only by continuing to fall second by second. Maarten Baas's Schiphol performer is an artwork as the labour of redrawing the minute hand. The kinetic faces of A Million Times have to traverse the continuous dance between 16:00's choreography and 17:00's choreography to display the difference between the two.

Weather art has the same structure. Anadol's wind paintings collapse into ordinary playback the moment the day's wind stops being updated. Outernet's The Rain ceases to be the work the moment the rain stops falling. teamLab's meadow only completes itself in correlation with the sky: Circle of Light at Noon appears because it is sunny; Crystallised Moments of Rain ignites because rain has come.

This is why these works sit somewhere other than the gallery-style exhibition format (visit during opening hours, view for a defined interval, leave). They are not one work = one video or one work = one installation. They are one work = a continuously updating state. Because signage as a medium operates twenty-four hours a day, the possibility opens for the screen to be used not as a "programme" (a time block with a beginning and an end) but as a "state" (a continuously rewriting present). The clock and the weather are the two most natural motifs through which that state can be made the subject of the work.

"Not a programme, a state" is, admittedly, a phrasing slightly orthogonal to the conventional vocabulary of broadcast. Terrestrial TV has time-signal programmes and weather slots — but those are sequences of bounded blocks: the 9:00 time signal, the 9:03 weather, the 9:05 regular show. Signage clock-and-weather art is otherwise. It does not partition. Rather than slotting time or weather into the schedule as a "programme," it operates the screen's underlying ground itself as time-or-weather. time++ is treated, in the wall's editorial schedule at Todtown, not as a "night slot" but as the ground of the screen as such.

This is where the pair of concepts this journal has long carried — ma (間), the interval or gap, and tenkei (点景), the small element placed within a landscape — surfaces in an unexpected way. Ma is what is opened up: a space, a pause. Signage, with its always-on update density, would seem to be the medium with the least room for any such opening — and yet, when a clock or a weather field becomes the ground, the very continuity of that update carves a sustained ma into the screen. Time passing is not an event. Rain falling is not an event. But the continuity of the update holds the screen, within the street, as a place that does not close. And onto that ground, the month-changing or season-changing or event-keyed works descend as tenkei: Kwok's time++ derivatives, Outernet's monthly programme, teamLab's seasonal pieces. Ma first, then tenkei alighting onto it — this structure, which signage has been struggling to find for itself, is precisely what time++ and Wind of Boston have re-acquired by running as the ground of the screen.

The Places of Waiting Pull Clocks and Weather Toward Them

Re-line the works geographically and operationally and a clear pattern emerges. Most of them are installed at places of waiting.

Schiphol Airport. Changi Airport (A Million Times). The lobby on Boston's Northern Avenue. The connecting corridor at Todtown. The department store on Shanghai's West Nanjing Road. The Outernet at Tottenham Court Road. In every case, the user has some business that requires their being there, but is spending the minutes-to-tens-of-minutes around their transition by waiting. Connecting flight, immigration queue, morning lobby before the office, metro transfer, gap between errands, pre-show on the way to a venue. The people in these places are not spending time on the goal itself; they are filling the time before the goal arrives.

That the clock and the weather pair well with such places is no accident. The clock is the instrument that reports the residual quantity of one's waiting time — how many minutes until the flight leaves, how many until the last train. The weather is the instrument that forecasts what is about to happen outside — an umbrella if it might rain; another layer if it is windy. Both keep guaranteed the connection between the people in the waiting place and their next action.

Signage clock-and-weather art lays an expressive layer over this utility floor. For the commuter past Xinzhuang's gates, Kwok's particle clock is both the announcement of the bare fact that it is 21:12, and the experience of that announcement dancing as it arrives. For someone crossing the lobby on Boston's Northern Avenue, Wind of Boston is both the information that today is a windy day in Boston, and the leisure of receiving that information as a painting. Utility and expression overlapping on the same screen is an editorial possibility specific to signage as a medium, and the artists working with clock-art and weather-art are the ones using it most adeptly.

The geography is also legible against China's own urban-policy register. Xinzhuang, where time++ is permanently installed, is the southern terminus of Shanghai Metro Line 1 and a long-running sub-centre development of the city's Minhang District. Todtown — the Xinzhuang Integrated Transport Hub — is one of the country's exemplary cases of TOD (transit-oriented development), bundling station, bus terminal, retail, and residential towers into a single complex. That a permanent 24-hour clock artwork is embedded in such a hub indicates that the Chinese trajectory of signage × art is unfolding on a different logic from the Western flagship-advertising clusters (Times Square, Piccadilly Lights) — a logic of embedding works into the everyday transit flow at a transport interchange.

A Time-Signal State, Not a Time-Signal Programme

The clock-art and weather-art lineages traced above offer one reference axis for thinking about the editorial form of permanent signage.

In conventional media vocabulary, signage scheduling is described as a sequence of "time-signal programmes" and "weather programmes" — bounded time blocks chained together. The 9:00 time signal, the 9:03 weather forecast, the 9:05 regular advert. The editorial form of permanent signage does not have to inherit that partitioning as given. What Kwok and Anadol demonstrate is a different organising principle: operate not a time-signal programme but a time-signal state; not a weather programme but a weather state.

A time-signal state means an operation in which the ground of the screen is always being updated as the current time. A weather state means an operation in which the ground of the screen is always being updated as the local atmosphere. Onto that ground, the month-changing, season-changing, event-keyed "programmes" alight as tenkei. In this two-layer architecture of ground and accent, the ground is entrusted to the clock and the weather; the accent is what editorial judgment determines.

This structure is one engineering answer to the question of how to design the "ground" of the distribution programme when permanent signage is being organised. Rather than attempting to edit and fill every time slot, the ground is delegated to the two most natural always-on motifs (clock and weather), and editorial resources are concentrated on the side of the tenkei. The larger the signage network grows, the more this "division of labour between ground and accent" becomes an operational necessity.

Outlook

The works above are, on the wide range of signage clock-and-weather art, only an entrance. For follow-up coverage we want to record several extension lines.

One is the hybrid that straddles clock and weather. Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd's Climate Clock (2020–, retrofitted onto the Metronome in New York's Union Square) continuously displays, on an 18-metre-wide LED, two numbers side by side: the time remaining before a climatic tipping point, and the share of energy generated from renewables. A public signage work where the lexicon of the clock and the lexicon of the atmosphere literally overlay — a candidate for the next dispatch.

A second is the series of TOD interchange nodes in China. Beyond Xinzhuang's Todtown, we want to extend coverage into Hangzhou's West Lake Skyscreen (the 2023 Digital Float programme that put Raven Kwok and others on the wall), Shenzhen's Glow Shenzhen, and the surrounding policy frame for signage × art at Chinese transit-oriented developments.

Finally, the major permanent-signage venues in Tokyo — TOKYO NODE LAB and TOP MUSEUM among them — and how each might design its own "time-signal state" and "weather state" as resident content, remains an object of ongoing editorial observation. The lineage traced in this essay should be read as the ground-laying for that observation.

21:12. Above the heads of those who have just passed through Xinzhuang's ticket gates, particles are quietly being updated. Tonight, again, the update does not stop.

Sources

1. fig.001Raven Kwok — time++ (TODTIME, 2019)(2019-12)
2. fig.002Tate,Christian Marclay — The Clock | Trailer (Tate)
3. fig.003Maarten Baas — Real Time (Schiphol Clock, 2016) | Vimeo(2016)
4. fig.004humanssince1982,Humans Since 1982 — A Million Times at Changi, 2014–2018 (YouTube)
5. fig.005Ars Electronica,Yugo Nakamura — Industrious Clock (2001) | Ars Electronica
6. fig.006Alexis André (@MacTuitui),Alexis André — 720 Minutes, Live Shibuya version (X / Twitter)(2021-12-17)
7. fig.007Raven Kwok — Time Left Shift 7 (Peak Performance × UCCA Lab, 2023)(2023-01)
8. fig.008Refik Anadol Studio — Wind of Boston: Data Paintings(2017)
9. [9]Maarten Baas — Real Time (Collection)
10. [10]The hands of Maarten Baas’ Schiphol clock are drawn on in real time — Dezeen(2016-07-05)
11. [11]Christian Marclay — The Clock (2010) | MoMA Collection
12. [12]Humans Since 1982 — A Million Times (Catalogue)
13. [13]Refik Anadol Studio — Bosphorus
14. [14]John Gerrard — Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014
15. [15]Olafur Eliasson — The Weather Project (2003)
16. [16]teamLab — Field of Wind, Rain and Sun (Higashi Osaka)(2024-10)
17. [17]Outernet — INTERACT: The Rain launches at Outernet London(2025-02-26)
18. [18]Yugo Nakamura — tha ltd.
19. [19]Alexis André — 720 Minutes | Art Blocks(2021)
20. [20]Metronome’s Climate Clock (2020) by Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd — Smith College Climate Lit