All Our Yesterdays

Our notion of time has evolved with our increasingly finite abilities to measure and track time. Before the invention of clocks and mechanical time, we watched the sky and chased the sun, the celestial bodies’ irregular rhythms determining the hour.

This, though, was not enough and we eventually divorced timekeeping from the heavens, placing ourselves under the fixed watch of machine dictated time. As our ability to measure time has become more finite, our world too has become smaller and smaller, and our experience of time faster and faster.

Time, at one point, was local. Each town kept its own time, but with the advance of trains, local time caused chaos in our ability to travel. As we collapsed our ideas of distance and space, we collapsed our notion of time, carving up the world into 24 time zone boundaries, each zone one hour ahead or behind its neighbor.

The following timezone map shows all sunset or sunrise photos uploaded to Instagram in the past day. Hover over a point on the map to see the corresponding photograph. Use the search bar in the upper right corner to search for a location and zoom in on photographs taken at your favorite city, park, or landmark.

We achieved a new kind of synchronicity and connectedness across space, divorced from the sun and the Earth's irregular rotation. Now as we move seamlessly between time zones, our only awareness of the sun’s hold on time are the photos we take of the sunset. We have replaced a local sense of time and place now with a global one.

Pan through an infinite horizon collage created from photographs taken by the Pilots of Instagram.The photos document the sun and horizon from thousands of feet above and are ordered by the local time of the image.

With the invention of atomic clocks, we now track the passing of time based on the osccilation of atoms. In a final move to divorce ourselves forever from the sun, we changed the international definiton of a second from being based on a duration of the solar day to the vibrations of an isotope of cesium.

It turns out, though, that we cannot truly divorce ourselves from the sun and the Earth's rotation, cannot fully free ourselves of time as determined by nature. The Earth's rotation is slowing yearly due to tidal friction, the unequal pulling of the moon and sun on the Earth and its oceans. So we must keep our clocks in sync with the Earth's slowing rotation, setting our Coordinated Universal Time back a leap second or two here and there.

Carl Jung first defined synchronicity as meaningful coincidences. A world in which clocks are synchronized allows us to find moments in time in which Instagram users upload a photograph of a sunrise at the same time as another user uploads a photograph of a sunset. Hundreds of times a day, users unknowingly post photos of the beginning of the day at the same time as other users post photos of the end of the day. See the synchronicity matches play out in the following map visualization. Hover over points on the map to see the photos.

Our absolute ideas of a fixed quantified time cannot escape the irregular rhythms of the cosmic world we call home. Instagram users who chase the sun with their cameras testify to the sun’s ceaseless grip on our lives. Since antiquity we have followed the path of the sun, the moon, and the stars to track the passing of time. Time itself though may just be an illusion constructed by our minds.