I had many different ideas for this piece, which was ultimately the primary cause of my failure. I spent too much time thinking of new ways of interpreting the prompt and came up with a plethora of half-ideas (which i will list below), but no fully fledged ideas. I am disappointed because I really like this prompt, but I will definitely revisit this prompt and create a nontraditional timepiece at some point in the near future.
My half-ideas:
- something to do with individual perceptions of time: I wanted a clock that moved as fast as the viewer thought time moved. However, the only way I could come up with to gauge this was for the user to manually put it in, which i really disliked. I wanted it to be less obvious/literal. I did not want them to realize the time was incorrect, which would be impossible if I directly prompted them to provide an input.
- something to do with the relationship between time and work/play: I thought about making the canvas look like a computer screen with two tabs: One more work/school related(document?) and the other a game. The time at the top left of the screen would increase faster when the game was played and slower when work was being done. I also did not like how literal this was. I think it would be more effective if it were not in p5?… or, if the screen size matched an actual computer screen resolution so it looked more real?
- a clock that fell asleep: similar design as the previous idea, but the time would stop changing after a long period of no mouse movement, and would continue when the mouse was moved aggressively (to “wake up” the clock)
- a clock that looks like the clocks used to teach children how to read time: but I didn’t want to use actual roman characters because they are too recognizable, but asemic numbers also look too foreign. The clock hands would move at nonlinear speeds but still end up accurate at each minute/hour.
My final timepiece is extremely basic. I came up with the idea while walking around the Hunt library to try and come up with ideas when I walked past the portrait of the man on the first floor. It felt like he was looking at me sentiently. I then went to create this time piece that looks like a normal painting, but slowly blinks/smiles/looks around at certain points in the day. I think this is an extremely cheap copout response to the prompt, but could perhaps be somewhat effective as an installation (it would be more effective if J.K. Rowling hadn’t led everyone to associate moving paintings with Harry Potter). I am fully aware that this piece is so impressively unimpressive, but one high five I will give myself is that one main goal I had with this project was to make it extremely not clock-looking and I did achieve that.
