Student Area

mokka – clock

fixed version!

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: 

11:48:06AM

Night:

shows how seconds are moving(not all seconds are shown)
10:19:19 PM

junebug-clock

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

pinkkk-clock

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

 

 

 

 

03-Timekeeping

I was externally shocked to learn about how bad (mathematically inaccurate ) our way of measuring time is. It is clear by the presentation that time, as we recognize it, is an extremely mathematical process that started out as basic observation.

mokka – Timekeeping

The readings made me think about how I never think of time technically or quite literally anymore. Especially once the pandemic started, my perception of time itself has changed. We, as humans, have this temporal agency where we can alter our view of the structure or management of time.

mokka – Meander

While looking at this work, I was reminded of another work from Meandering River is an audiovisual art installation created by onformative and FunkHaus Berlin Sound Chamber. To see an alternative way to create land was very fascinating to me.

sticks-Timekeeping

I found it very interesting from yourcalendricalfallcyis.com that timezones aren’t set in stone, where countries like Samoa made a decision to switch its timezone, and that new timezones are created (Eastern Russia) when the timezone the area is in does not fit.

Another idea that stuck with me was from Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production, where Johanna Drucker manifested a perspective on time that states,”Humanistic temporality is broken, discontinuous, partial, fragmented, in its fundamental conception and model” (Drucker). I never viewed time as something that had so many errors and historical mistakes, and sort of just followed it since it is generally seen as an accurate system to structure our entire lives around.

sticks-meander

One of my biggest takeaways from Meander was that many steps, revisions, and trials are necessary to create a successful project. A lot of tinkering is done in his development of the Oxbow Lakes and the Road Maps, where drafts and recreation helped him achieve his final form. His project is a reminder that many great works don’t start out as great works, and that “The network of roads didn’t begin as a network of roads” (Hodgin).

Toad2 – Timekeeping

While we have atomic clocks, the fact there are clocks out there that are not precise and that large portion of human history operated upon an inaccurate time scale sticks with me because it makes me question the historical timeline. This fact raises the question of how this different time scale causes people to experience life differently and perhaps view life to be faster or slower.