Tonight at sunset—or another time this weekend, in conjunction with the final NEPO 5K Don't Run—the artist and past Stranger Genius DK Pan is staging a skywriting of his poem "TIME IS MEMORY" over Seattle. The poem will vanish, so he's asking people to look up, to photograph it, and to document what they see from wherever they are in the city (on Twitter using the hashtag #timeismemory, or by emailing him directly).

Pan's poem is a response, he says, to the phrase "Time is money."

It's also a nod to Seattle's history, according to him. Pan says skywriting was invented in Seattle.

That's skywriting: Made in Seattle. Really? Neither Wikipedia nor The Atlantic mention Seattle; The Atlantic offers the tidbit that the New York Times called skywriting "celestial vandalism," and I do believe Pan would like that. (I'm working on settling this history question, but I need to publish this post before the sunset event tonight, weather permitting. If the weather doesn't work tonight, it will happen at some point during a sun break this weekend.)

Pan says skywriting was invented in Seattle in 1913, when a guy named Milton J. Bryant wrote "SP," for "Seattle Potlatch" over the city during the Potlatch Days festival, which involved "riots," saloon-closings, and an attempt by the mayor to shut down the publishing of The Seattle Times.

There's precedent for skywriting art, by the way. The most famous example is Vik Muniz's cloud project, in which he skywrote a cloud shape into a cloudless sky.

But here's another history Pan offers: He says Paul Dorpat, the Seattle author and historian, wrote "SKY" above Seattle in 1970, which is sort of another version of Muniz's cleverness. (More conceptual 1970s, less pictorial 1990s.)

Now I have many things to track down.

For the project, Pan hired Oliver's Flying Circus, who recently did this in New Orleans.