Ewan’s clock is a reference to one historical attempt to redefine and rationalize the calendar. On 5 October 1793, the Republic of France, formed just after the revolution, abandoned the commonly used Gregorian calendar in favour of an entirely new model: the French Republican Calendar. The clock shows decimal time, dividing the day into 10 parts instead of 24. Midnight strikes at 10 am, midday at 5 pm; each hour is divided into a hundred minutes, and each minute into a hundred seconds.
Ruth Ewan, We Could Have Been Everything That We Wanted to Be, metric clockwork, steel, plexiglas, 2011
