Category: 03-Clock

I have already said this in my “Timekeeping” post but I feel it is very relevant to what I serve here. I am sure, once the pandemic started, most of us felt that our perception of time has changed. We, as humans, have this temporal agency where we can alter our view of the structure or management of time based on our experiences, how we spend our time, or our environment.

For this assignment, I responded purely visually. There’s no story, there’s no theme. Just my raw, visual response to when I hear the words “abstract” and “clock”. Time to me is progression; an item that is constantly additive.

The hardest part for me about this project was really trying to manifest the visual I had in my head onto my sketches AND into a computational design. There are moments where I feel the transfer of information from my brain to this design has lost some of its elements, but a part of me was glad that it did miss some components or else it would have been way too complicated to look at.

Link to code

Sketch:

Day: 

Night:

Charted Territory Timekeeper

I was inspired by Dr. Donna Carroll’s lecture about the history of timekeeping, and I was so enamored with the ways of timekeeping before knowing time was a necessity. I’ve always love astrology, so I decided to base my inspiration off of charting maps and celestial time in astrology and the overlaps that are drawn between planets, moons, and stars. Included in my picture of inspirations, there were orbit maps that mimicked geometry curves. At first, I used an epitrochoid curve instead of my ellipses to demonstrate seconds, but I found it a little too busy on the canvas and I found it difficult to track with seconds. So instead, the seconds are measured with the rotating elongated ellipses (resembling orbits) as well as measured with the stars in the background (each star is added every second). Minutes are measured with the lines that resemble chart lines, but it also looks resembles our traditional clock design. The hours are measured with the circles rotating around (resembling lunar cycles), and one circle is added per hour. One detail I included was that the minute lines are spaced evenly for each “moon” to fit so it looks like the chart lines could be a measurement for the moon.

@ 9:12pm

@ 5:09am

@ 11:47am

Inspiration images (left) and my sketch (right) – Click image to expand

From the very beginning, I wanted to do something related to typography since I am a graphic/communications design major. My previous attempt involved me actually coding up complex typographic shapes, which actually not surprisingly, given my current computational skillset, I ended up with truly ugly looking type.

With Golan’s guidance, I scratched my previous exploration and started fresh. This time I learned that even simplicity is extremely hard to control well.

My final approach uses 10 letters from A to I to denote the numbers {0,1, …, 9}. One challenge Golan suggested was to limit my choice of graphic shapes that I can use to build the letters to make it interesting.

A to I + Z

@12:34

Aside from my interest in typography, I also really wanted to take this project to practice my basic drawing and animations skills. How can I construct 9 letter with only 3 rectangles?

By limiting my graphic shapes, the opportunity for smooth interpolation between the letters arose. Even though it took my forever to get to here, and I am still not satisfied with the occasional glitches, but overall, I learned a ton of basic skills through this project.

@07:45

There is definitely a lot lacking that I can keep working on and improve on, and I hope someday that I can actually design and implement my own generative / computational typography.

@06:50

___________________________________________

After receiving feedback, I realized that my animation is not as good as it should be, and the letters will form ACAB at 13:12 in the afternoon. So I expanded my alphabet to A to L, and now the hour can be represented by a single letter. I also added the seconds digits so it’s less boring to look at. Unfortunately, I do not have time to improve my animation before the final deadline, therefore I took out the animations.

CODE

 

 

 

 

8:24

LINK TO PROJECT

This was an experience for me to make, as I went through hundreds of testimonies of victims (or their families) who suffered from the violence from the Colombian military, to the ELN, to the different paramilitary groups, to the FARC and female victims of assault through the different periods of armed conflict. I have done a lot of projects recently on the idea of constructing archives and stories, and something that has been on my mind a lot recently is the lived experiences of victims and the numerical definitions of massacre and collective trauma. So in this project, I created a clock that through the period of ten minutes, displays a unique version of these stories. To be able to view this clock, the left-most side displays the current minute represented by the number of words, the middle column represents the ten’s place digit of the seconds (thus it changes every 10 seconds) and the rightmost column represents the one’s digit.

The hardest part of this piece was trying to find a way of approaching this sensitive topic in a proper and respectful way, I translated a lot of the anecdotes at first quite literally, but many of the stories were violent and incredibly difficult to digest. There is also often a difficulty in trying to describe the violence that exists in Latin America without make it the defining quality of these nations. It often feels like as a Colombian, so many of our conversations are focused on avoiding the armed conflict as a topic, it felt uncomfortable to make this piece but I still made it because it is a very real struggle for many, and for those who live it every day through memories.

4:10-419

10:00

here is an earlier revision! CW: More explicit mentions of sexual assault and violence. 

 

NOTES:

(CW: Mentions of violence)

 

EDIT: 9/17/2020

I edited the text to be slightly bigger, and added more variation to the statements so that it doesn’t feel as repetitive!

link2clock

Day time:

16:42:48

12:43:57

Night time:

22:43:08

06:42:16

Process:

Coming up with an idea was definitely the hardest part of this project. Because I have never thought of depicting time in other formats other than digital or analog clocks, I spent a large portion of time pondering what would and could be an abstract clock. Pondering for a while made me conclude that any “clocks” could be laid in a line, where one end of the line being well-functioning useful (the clocks we can commonly find), while the other end being very abstruse (too abstract that some people might not consider it a clock). Because I do believe that all clocks do serve the function of representing time (as in how much of a day has past/left), I wanted to create a clock that could be read, yet still is an unconventional way of showing the time.

After going through numerous idea sketches, I settled with an abacus clock. Just like the timekeeping history, abacus has been around since the ancient period as a calculator. I remember learning how to use abacus when I was just beginning to learn simple math like addition and subtraction, and the impression I had of an abacus is that it looks funky yet organized. I had a hard time using abacus, but other people, especially those in the abacus competition, seem to easily take advantage of abacus. In fact, people who have been using abacus to calculate do the majority of the mental arithmetic by using the imaginary abacus inside their mind. I find that quite amusing, because to me, abacus was just an object that had little pebble-like pieces that I could fidget with and perhaps be a tiny little help in doing addition and subtraction.

Sketch:

I enjoyed creating this clock because I had an opportunity to create one that’s to my taste and preference. For example, I set the background color to be black if it’s not between 8AM and 5PM because I don’t like looking at a bright screen when it’s dark outside. Another instance would be the rotating color-changing cubes; I love watching things move around, especially in 3D, when I’m spacing out. Since those who would be looking at this clock on the LED screen (if it’s presented) would have already made a decision to spend some portion of their time looking at the clock, I wanted the clock to be more engaging and interesting to them(i.e. have some movements that people can stare at).

How to use:

Each pair of columns from left to right respectively represents hour, minute, and second. Anyone is invited to use this clock as a clock by reading the abacus, or just as a time passing object by looking at the cubes rotate and change colors.