Скачать или смотреть The Water Clock - Southwold Pier

The Southwold Pier Water Clock is one of those gloriously bonkers contraptions that could only have sprung from the minds of two British eccentrics with too much imagination and not quite enough funding. Built in 1998 by Tim Hunkin and Will Jackson — both artists, engineers, and, one suspects, part-time lunatics — the whole thing was cobbled together in just three weeks on what might politely be described as a “shoestring budget.”

It was intended as a whimsical lesson in water recycling, and it does indeed recycle water, though not quite in the earnest, educational way that local councils might have had in mind. Instead, water is pumped laboriously up from the well below to power a spectacle that can only be described as gleefully juvenile: the half-hourly “pee show,” in which a pair of mechanical figures perform an act of synchronized urination that somehow manages to be both educational and, well, deeply British.

When I went to see it, the weather was doing its usual impression of a wet dishcloth — leaden skies, horizontal drizzle, the full English summer experience. Still, there was something rather wonderful about standing on that breezy pier, watching a clock powered by water and mischief, and thinking: only in Britain would time itself be measured in bladder control.

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