Press coverage

The Daily Telegraph, 8 February 1995

The Times, 1 February 1995:
"On the floor, constrained within a shallow wooden threshold, Miyajima has placed 45 small electric cars each about nine inches by six and with a red counter on its roof. As the visitor looks down, the cars crawl slowly and silently across the floor, counting out the digits from I to 9 as they go. They do not collide or crash into the walls because they are fitted with sensors which detect the approach of an obstacle and put the motors into reverse. Mostly they run in perfectly straight lines, but immediately after reversing. they seem to curve gently before setting off on a new path. The effect, in a room blacked out by thick curtains, is curiously mesmeric. Sometimes the cars stop altogether, apparently drawing breath. Sometimes several form a small and brilliant constellation in one corner of the room, then part again and resume their endless wanderings." (Nigel Hawkes)

Blueprint, March 1995:
"You can just about sense you are in a large hall, but it is impossible to see anything more than the silhouettes of the other visitors and the constant counting of red LEDs below. The numbers move, appearing to float across the space. They are powered by small electric motors, which punctuate the passing of time with their soft noise. When one number bumps into another its trajectory is altered. The counting is progressive 1... 2... 3... 4... 5... but each mobile unit seems to mark time at a different speed."

The Daily Telegraph, 8 February 1995:
"No newspaper reproduction can convey the hypnotic beauty of what he does with flickering lights in darkened rooms, so my wholly inadequate words will have to suffice to persuade you to trek out to Greenwich to see what he has done to the Great Hall of the Queen's House.

" [...] To see it, the visitor climbs a winding staircase to an overhanging gallery. In the pitch dark he looks down on the unforgettable spectacle of a restlessly moving mass of red numbers made out of LEDs or light emitting diodes. What we are actually seeing are dozens of electronic counters mounted on tiny wheels so that they glide silently through the darkened space.

" [...] And because the surrounding darkness gives the viewer no sense of scale, the whole marvellous phenomenon seems to be happening in space, like atoms colliding under a microscope, or the traffic of downtown Tokyo seen from the air at night." (Richard Dorment)

The Independent, 15 February 1995:
"Taking the passage of time as his theme (Greenwich, of course, is where official time, or GMT, begins and ends), the artist has blacked out the windows and set time (red, digitalised and ever-changing) coursing round the floor of the perfectly proportioned hall on the back of tiny, invisible electronic dodgem cars. Time is represented as a kind of hypnotic chaos, a lovely conceit in a building where absolute and permanent mathematical ratios and proportions rule." (Jonathan Glancey - read full article)

Art Monthly, 1995:
"As one settled into this harmony, where order, even in its randomness, seemed reliable and permanent and, as one's eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, paintings, in deep classical frames, statues and the detail of architectural decoration could be discerned in the gloom. With that, the bright digital vehicles were starkly exposed as being chronologically alien but this only served to magnify Miyajima's observations on time and movement within it. The ease of his handling of the complexities of his subject reiterates the work's apparent simplicity despite his subjugation of technological complexities; Running Time provides a cathartic and utopian antidote for current times." (Godfrey Worsdale)

Asian Times, 18 March 1995:
"What was perhaps most striking about the exhibition was the incongruity between Miyajima's technological masterpiece and the classical formal beauy of the Queen's House and grounds. He transformed the interior of the Great Hall, furnished with seventeenth-century portraits of stern-looking arosticrats, into a moving picture of time" (Saba Salman)

The Independent on Sunday, 15 June 1997:
"Seen from the balcony above the Great Hall, it looked as if the contents of a digital clock had been shaken into a night sky and the numbers left to find their own way home. What the dazzled eye couldn't see were the 40 bumper-cars driving the LED numbers around the marble floor. Spaghetti junction met the solar system in a meditation on time and timelessness that was at once immense and intimate." (Rosanna de Lisle - read full article)

The Guardian, 28 November 2002:
"Artist Tatsuo Miyajima has said, "We do not need to understand time, although we think that we do. But we are living it." Living it, we know it will end. Life without a horizon would be intolerable, even if we never know quite how distant that horizon might be. Was this also what the Bistritsa Babi were singing to? And in the little death of each illuminated sequence of digits counting down from nine to one, over and again, the numbers sweeping across the darkened floor of Inigo Jones's Queen's House at Greenwich on the Meridian line in Miyajima's Running Time installation, was it this distance they were counting? They too had a beautiful futility, in a clock room all their own." (Adrian Searle - read full article)