Demo: link  & Repo: link

For my abstract clock project, I wanted to present the passage of time from the perspectives of mayflies, a species with extremely short lives. Adult mayflies have an average lifespan of one day. I wanted to step away from presenting the exact time with seconds, minutes and hours, and instead divide the whole day into 4 stages: emergence, swarming, mating, and death. Since I couldn’t found an exact record of time of transitions, the current version is built with evenly distributing 6 hours to each stage.

Concept: ephemerality/decay/“朝生暮死” (birth in the morning death at dawn)

I went through a lot of adjustments from abstracting the form of mayflies to simple custom shapes, to deciding how each stage should be presented differently from the previous one. Ideally I would like to solve the frame-rate issue and look for more natural ways to show the transitioning.

Link

Due to being in my room all the time due to quarantine, I feel like it’s hard for me have a sense of time since my room doesn’t get much natural light. Because of this, I wanted to focus upon the cyclical nature of time and inconsistency and shapelessness of time for me. However, I wanted this clock to be able to be read occasionally when everything lines up perfectly as there parts of my life that loosely give my life structure. I also experimented with the concept of countable objects vs many in the way I implemented the number of shapes and allow the user to make the mental shortcut and simply guess and approximate the time.

Progress:

Sketches:

my code: https://editor.p5js.org/miniverse/sketches/uhuv5GAOY

***EDIT***

my process:

I wanted to make an API based clock where I took the time and searched for a spotify song with related words or numbers in the title. However, because the clock won’t have internet connection when displayed, Golan suggested scraping texts and getting excerpts which mention the time. Those could be  stored statically as small files along with the code. Therefore I wouldn’t need the internet.

To do this, one needs some knowledge of python and mountains of plain text to look at. I had python expertise, and Golan pointed me to a repo with all of Project Gutenberg (database of text out of copywrite) saved as a plain text 8 GB zip file.

The picture below is part of the preprocessing python script I used to parse Gutenberg for a couple hours. I listed calendar key words and looked for them linearly by looping through all the files. I stored the line the keyword was in to a JSON.

This was the first iteration of the clock when I didn’t scrape the text properly and and didn’t read the documentation for p5.js:

changes to the display code from the photos above:

1. I removed the font. The text has german, Russian, Spanish and other characters that “Vogue.tff” from free fonts.com doesn’t support. Now I use Times New Roman.
2. I rescraped all the texts and screened for profanity.  The way I scraped before had bugs and was on a computer with not enough processing power.
   1. Here are the scripts for scraping and filtering profanity: https://github.com/himalinig/gutenberg_clock
3. I include the minutes and seconds. For each text excerpt I also include the title of the text it came from. I restructured the code and read through the p5.js documentation which opened allowed me to fix the irregular highlighting.

Here’s the gifs of the new and improved project:

during the minute:

when the minute changes:

Another one:

Things I learned:

• Don’t do this the night before. I couple of hours when I wasn’t exhausted was more productive than the all nighter I pulled.
• Process is important. It was hard to isolate bugs when too many variables could be responsible. Make small changes, test, and then add complexity.
•  Make changes in order of importance. Small changes that are hard to figure out can be done later.