The work places a large (2.5 metre) LED type digit on the wall. The seven segments of the digit are acoustic rather than visual indicators, and emit sounds which are switched to coincide with the counting of this giant number, the familiar 7 segment digit is thus experienced as an auditory phenomenon instead of a visual one. Mounted on a column facing the wall is a large light emitting digit, counting in time with the acoustic digit.
‘Sponsored by the time’ takes as its starting point Steve Reich’s 1965 composition ‘Come Out’ in which the words ‘come out to show them’ are repeated and layered until they are relieved of their signification and become abstract sound elements.
My choice of an excerpt from the speaking clock announcement (The full text of which is “at the third stroke the time sponsored by Accurist will be ten fifty precisely”) was derived from the notion that, after 18 years of Thatcherism everything, even the time, can be commodified and sponsored.
The LED digit’s seven segments which, by convention, are identified by the letters A-G, are used to voice versions of this same phrase, tuned to the appropriate notes of the musical scale, thus forming a series of chords and discords as well as allowing the emergence of secondary and tertiary rhythms as the voices phase in and out of synchrony.