Neurotic Armageddon Indicator: A Data Sculpture

Neurotic Armageddon Indicator (NAI) is an installation artwork which, taking the form of a small ’80s style, wall clock, visualizes the ‘Doomsday Clock’, a symbolic clock maintained by an academic journal, ‘The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ (BoAS). The Doomsday Clock represents the proximity to Armageddon expressed as minutes to midnight where midnight is nuclear holocaust. By relocating the symbolic clock to a physical installation, I argue that NAI affords a discursive attitude to the subject of nuclear Armageddon. The clock display is updated as a web-scraper “neurotically” checks the status of the Doomsday Clock as often as possible. In reality the clock is updated at rare intervals, often years apart. Thus NAI conducts a mostly redundant act of verification.