yanwen-clock

 

 

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.