“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Technical Reflection:
I initially wanted to represent the action of ‘killing’ time through the shadow of a knife over the clock, but found the lamp didn’t produce a pronounced shadow. I also had the idea to fire a toy gun at the clock in a cycle, but I realized that these kinds of ideas were too blunt. I found that using just fake blood splattered on the clock face provided enough of a clue as to what’s happening to the clock.
The motor I was using was also fairly low torque, so I wasn’t able to slow down the clock enough to resemble a normal clock without stopping the motor completely. Also, the motor I was using was far too loud to hear the ticking of the clock, I might have also compensated through some other timer to generate noise.
Overall, I’m pretty happy with this project, I feel I was fairly successful in achieving the atmosphere I wanted to create.
Zip File with Fritzing schematic and code:
