What pushed you to consider a new lunar calendar?
I started making sculptures from casts of sand ripples, that can be found on beaches at low tide. You can see a close up of the surface of one in the banner of this page just above.
This led to an interest in the physics of the tides. The moon, as many will know, is linked to the tides on earth. It is the orbital relationship of the earth, the moon and also the sun which sum together to create the rising and falling of our oceans.
Placing these impressions in an alternate timeline seemed very compatible with what I was trying to achieve with the sculptures so I started naming them according to a system derived from the lunar cycle.
About Calendars, the Sun and the Moon:
The most widely used Calendar system in the world, the Gregorian calendar, is a solar calendar. This means that for most people the sun’s relationship with the earth dictates time as they measure and record it. For example, the period of the earth’s orbit around the sun dictates the ‘solar year’ more commonly the ‘year’ and the complete rotation of the earth the ‘solar day’ or simply ‘day’.
However, there are many other calendars and systems of measuring the passage of time. An astronomer may be more concerned with the rotation of the earth in relation to the stars than the sun, which the earth orbits, and divide their time into ‘sidereal days’.
The Islamic calendar or Hijra calendar is a lunar calendar. A Hijra year consists of 12 lunar months each 29 or 30 days long - an integer approximation for irrational period which can be closer approximated as 29.53 solar days. Most interestingly, many versions of the Hijra calendar may only be predicted into the future. The exact end of a month and the start of a new are actually revealed by observation of the new moon by clerics.
Although, the two calendars above are characterised as Solar and Lunar respectively, both remain influenced by the sun and the moon. For example in the Gregorian calendar the months are between 29 and 31 days, very close to the lunar month of ~29.53 days. Indeed the word “month” shares a common root with the word “moon”. Similarly, although the year and the month of the Hijra are defined by the moon, the day is dictated by the rising and setting of the sun.
There is a third class of calendar, the Lunisolar calendars, of which there are a great many sophisticated examples throughout the world and throughout history.
These calendars promise to fix seasons and festivals in a locked, repeating cycle, unlike a the Hijra lunar calendar, in which the year is shorter than the solar year and a festival may fall in summer or winter. In addition, months can be marked in the passage of moons in a satisfying and practical manner.
If Lunisolar calendars have been prevalent throughout the globe and history, why should I attempt to make a new one?
Initially I was simply curious. If I had not set out to design a calendar I would not have even considered the other existing lunisolar calendars. Therefore, it is not because I have any reason to think my calendar will surpass the existing calendars in accuracy or symbolic meaning.
Why having discovered mature alternative calendars do I still think a new one is worth pursuing?
The other existing calendars are rather complex and had to be, they had to preserve the concept of time into the past and future with great accuracy. Agriculture, astronomy and religious traditions demanded continuity through the ages.
However, the continuity of time is now largely maintained by the observation of the oscillation of caesium atoms in atomic clocks. This time is divorced from the movements of the celestial bodies which were our principle orientation through time until the twentieth century. The second, once a division of an average day, a division of a solar year is now scientifically defined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom”, or 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium atom.
Furthermore, most time reckoning is now achieved with computers and counted simply in seconds, or a fraction of, since a given epoch. Years, months, days and hours are simply calculated on demand from this single integer value and can be rendered in various different calendars and time zones as required. Perhaps the most common system is Unix time which is counted from 1 January 1970. Mac and Windows may use alternate epochs but time is still a single dimensional affair to a computer.
Therefore, the Gregorian calendar, and all other predetermined calendars, as we experience them, are now a virtual masks applied to this abstract digital time system of conceptually limitless ticks. Any contemporary calendar now has no requirement to resolve exactly the discrepancies between the length of 12 lunar months and the solar year in order to keep internal order over years and centuries. Where other calendars needed to add days or even months in strict rotation. A new calendar may simply compare known facts such as the length of a year and the appearance of a new moon in a basic algorithm and output unique combinations of months and days, for each year until the limit of predictable time.
Furthermore business and agriculture is almost universally conducted in the Gregorian Calendar, freeing this calendar from such practical requirements. It need only serve as a cosmological or poetic calendar.