Zeitfeld, Installation artwork in Volksgarten, Düsseldorf, Germany

Zeitfeld is a permanent artwork by Klaus Rinke at the western entrance of Volksgarten in Düsseldorf. It consists of 24 station clocks with double-sided faces mounted on six-metre steel columns, all pointing the same direction and synchronized with the Braunschweig atomic clock, so they show the same time. The clocks are arranged so that no one can see all of them at once.

Artist Klaus Rinke created this work for the 1987 Federal Garden Exhibition as a public artwork in Volksgarten. He drew inspiration from childhood memories of train stations and his fascination with how modern society measures and experiences time.

The clocks came from Telefonbau und Normalzeit Lehner & Co. and were originally driven by a single master clock. Klaus Rinke, son of a freight-train loading master in Wattenscheid, spent much of his childhood on station grounds and called the clocks at night "my moons". He reads them as an image of the brevity of human life.

You can reach the installation easily from the main paths of Volksgarten, where it sits openly in the garden space. It is accessible year-round and at any time since there are no barriers, though you should watch your footing as you move between the tall poles.

All twenty-four clocks show the same time, synchronised with the atomic clock in Braunschweig, yet the six-metre steel columns and their spacing mean no one can read them all at a glance. The clocks came from Telefonbau und Normalzeit Lehner & Co. At every change between summer and winter time the Zeitfeld appears in the media, once even on front pages in Hawaii, without naming it.