Hey Ace: Have you seen those peculiar timepieces —the ones with the animated sun and moon circling around the screen—that have been popping up around the Downtown Mall? My little girl found a kid-sized version in one of the Virginia Discovery Museum play zones, and later I spotted another one in the Bank of America lobby, built into a grandfather clock. What’s the deal?—Chrono-Curious-in-Charlottesville
You know, Ace remembers seeing that whirly clock thingy at a First Friday art opening in BozArt Gallery, during his hunt for the evening’s finest hors d’oeuvres. Having stuffed his coat pockets with Lindt chocolate truffles and prosciutto squares, Ace slinked toward the door—only to find himself suddenly grabbed by the subtle glow of an LCD screen, and curiously transfixed by the circular motion of the heavenly bodies on display.
The mystery apparatus is called a “Synclecron,” part of a series created in collaboration by local artist John Lynch and inventor Yale Landsberg. Lynch built and painted the cases of the three clocks on the Downtown Mall, which originally displayed at the Paramount Theatre in November 2009; Landsberg conceived of the mechanism itself, and wrote a program for it with the help of hardware guru Jeremy Pratts. In principle, the Synclecron juxtaposes standard time with a graphic depicting the natural cycles of day and night. At any given time, in other words, it’ll show you the position of the sun and moon as they’d appear to the observer, and also emits a corresponding level of ambient light.
Why? In an e-mail, Landsberg detailed the potentially therapeutic effect of the clocks on the Circadian rhythms of the observer. By “resupplying” the human biological clock with visual information about natural time cycles—especially during winter or in an indoor work setting, when that information isn’t readily available—Landsberg says the Synclecron may help people overcome insomnia, chronic fatigue, symptoms of arthritis and a variety of other disorders. For this reason, in addition to the Mall series, Syncleron clocks also reside in the Alzheimer’s and dementia units of the Morningside and Our Lady of Peace assisted living centers in Charlottesville, among other places.
So does it work? Ace, whose biological processes might be beyond repair, hasn’t arrived at a verdict yet. But either way, it’s one of the prettiest placebos he’s ever seen.
You can ask Ace yourself. Intrepid investigative reporter Ace Atkins has been chasing readers’ leads for 21 years. If you have a question for Ace, e-mail it to ace@c-ville.com.
