Assignment 3 - Experimental Clock

Write a description for your experimental clock. How is it novel to you and how might it alter the way you track / keep time?

My clock is an ode to artist Tatsuo Miyajima's "Sea of Time" project. Last year, I had the good fortune to visit his exhibit in Naoshima, an island in Japan colloquially known as "Art Island". For this exhibit, you walk into a dark house, where the ground in the middle is filled with a few inches of water; scattered in the water is a set of red and green LED lights, counting down from 9 to 0 at different speeds.

Each timer's speed was decided by a member of the Naoshima community. This art house had a magical quality to it, where you felt engulfed by a communal aura of time. The exhibit made me think on my perception of time, how it is not necessarily a flat line, but instead dependent on one's own consciousness. Tatsuo's work certainly inspired my perception of time, and I wanted to express that in this assignment.

Describe your design process. Include all three of your design sketches and explain how you’ve ended up choosing one.

I began with my 3 sketches/ideas, which I outlined here.

My breakout group strongly favorited the Sea of Time sketch, which I felt good about since I'm particularly passionate about that one.

I wanted to express randomness in my project, as I felt this randomness would replicate the experience I felt in Naoshima. I had trouble expressing timers of different speeds purely using second() or millis(), as the frameRate stays constant for all objects. I ended up leveraging setTimeout for each object to recursively call its own timer method.

What’s your overall reflection on this assignment? What have you learned throughout the process of designing an unconventional clock.

I felt good overall about the project. I was happy to give my interpretation of an art piece that was so impactful to me. My experimental clock was more of an abstract take on time itself, rather than a linear measurement model. I've learned that code often does not play well with time when it is in a non-standard format.