How to Bridge San Francisco and Kiel — A Sea Level Project
Panel Diskussion beim Waterkant Festival 2026 mit Jonathan Keats, Tim Logan und Stephan Juricke (in englisch)
What if two cities on opposite sides of the world shared a clock driven not by seconds, but by the slow, irreversible rise of the sea?
Kiel and San Francisco are sister cities — both shaped by the water they sit on, both facing the consequences of a changing climate on their shores. Now an ambitious art-and-science project asks what it would mean for these two port cities to share a clock calibrated not to atomic time, but to sea level: the most honest, most patient, and most consequential measurement our changing planet produces.
The idea draws its philosophical backbone from the Long Now Foundation — the San Francisco-based organisation that has, since 1996, been building a clock designed to run for 10,000 years inside a mountain in Texas. Founded by thinkers including Stewart Brand and Brian Eno, the Long Now Foundation challenges our civilisational addiction to short-term thinking. Their core provocation: the most important decisions we face — climate, ecology, infrastructure, democracy — unfold across centuries and millennia, while our institutions, our politics, and our attention spans operate in quarters and news cycles. To think responsibly about the future, we first need to feel the weight of deep time.
That philosophy is the quiet engine behind this project.
Jonathon Keats — acclaimed by The New Yorker as a "poet of ideas" — has spent years translating Long Now thinking into physical objects people can stand in front of. His Global Fluvial Clock & Planetary Clepetra in Vienna keeps time with the flow of the world's great rivers, drifting ahead or behind the Gregorian calendar as climate change alters their rhythms across geological timescales. His next provocation: a monumental sea level clock connecting Kiel and San Francisco — two sister cities on two coastlines, both watching the water rise, designed to make that rise visible, tangible, and impossible to ignore across generations.
In this session, Keats is joined by Prof. Dr. Stephan Juricke from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, who brings the science of what sea level actually tells us. Unlike tides — the twice-daily rhythms driven by moon and sun — sea level change operates on the timescales of decades and millennia, accumulating silently until coastlines are permanently redrawn. The Baltic Sea, nearly tideless, makes this signal unusually clear: what you measure here is not the daily pulse of the ocean, but its long-term trajectory. Tim Logan from the City of Kiel's Science Comes to Town initiative asks the essential urban question: where does a project like this land in a city, and how do you turn a slow, almost imperceptible change into a public landmark that makes residents feel what the data already knows?
Together, the three explore whether a clock built for millennia can do what policy papers and dashboards cannot — make a city feel the future arriving at its waterfront, centimetre by centimetre. And whether the sister city relationship between Kiel and San Francisco might become the foundation for something genuinely new: a shared temporal commons between two port cities learning to think in deep time.
Speakers:
Jonathon Keats — Artist & Experimental Philosopher, San Francisco / Northern Italy
Prof. Dr. Stephan Juricke — Ocean Researcher, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel
Tim Logan — Project Lead Science Comes to Town, City of KielPart of the Science for Impact Track at Waterkant Festival 2026 — where science meets the city.
Info und Anmeldung
19.06.2026, 12:00 - 12:45 MESZ
Science Comes to Robot Stage
www.waterkant.sh/programmWaterkant Festival Gelände
MFG5 Gelände, Halle 51
Schusterkrug 25
24159 Kiel
Das Projekt für Kiel und San Francisco ist noch in der Planung, bisherige Projekte und Hintergründe:
