Planet der Pendler mit den drei Zeitmonden

Planet der Pendler mit den drei Zeitmonden has been running at Vienna's Wien Mitte and Landstraße station since 1993. Four linked screens hang in a corridor that connects the subway to the rapid transit platforms. Each one shows a live video of the commuters streaming past, in one of Vienna's busiest transit hubs. Hofstetter Kurt, an Austrian media artist, created the work, which ranks as Austria's first permanent video computer art installation in public space.

A fisheye lens bends that flow into a single planet floating in a computer-generated universe. Three time moons circle it, and their relative positions give you the current time. Footsteps are amplified and played back as ticking, so the sound is made of the crowd itself. The installation encodes the presence of the passengers in four networked pendulum clockworks. Kurt's approach draws on philosophical mathematics, making time and infinity tangible during an ordinary commute.

Wiener Linien, the city's transport operator, has restored the work, which stands as the oldest permanent media installation in Austria's public space. A book documents the making of the piece, with images and archive material from 1989 to 1993. When you check the hour, you read it off three moons circling a planet made of the people around you.