Week 1 - Timekeeper Assignment

Clocks I like

So for this assignment I already knew of some timekeeper designs and found others that really got me thinking about time in different ways.

My top pick is probably the Nitendo alarmo clock. Maybe because I love Mario or maybe because its "interactive" and Im in a "interactive" arts program. But it is this interactive alarm clockt that uses motion sensors and has different game themed sounds and animations, and I love how playful it is and how it turns waking up into a game instead of it beeping at you, and I believe it stops once you have fully gotten out of bed.

Then theres this marble clock I saw on twitter first, where the mechanism uses marbles rolling through tracks to show the time as a digital pixalated counter clock would. Something about the physicality of it and watching the marbles move like puzzle pieces is just satisfying. It makes time feel tangible in a way digital clocks dont.

I was always interested in sundials but found this cool example of these giant mechanical arms that act like a sundial. It's like taking this ancient way of telling time and making it into this massive kinetice sculpture. The scale of it changes how you think about the suns movement.

Some honorable mentions. "The Clock" by Christian Marclay (2010) is a 24 hour film made of clips from movies showing clocks. Astrolabes count as clocks because they are intricate astronomical calculators. The Delacorte Clock at the Central Park Zoo has little animal musicians that play every hour. The Metronome at Union Square is one I never really liked. But I got intrigued when they recently switched it to countdown to the climate doomsday clock.

My Timekeeper Designs

I have been thinking about making a poop clock for this class. I have two ideas brewing, both are speculative designs at this point in "time"

Design 1: The Circadian Poop Clock

This one would have up and down curves. The curves represent uptime and downtime. A turd or poop symbol shows around when I actually poop (data I started tracking the last few days). Each curve is a full day and night cycle. Sometimes I have to wake up in the middle of the night to go. You gotta go when you gotta go right. This design tracks my bodys rhythms. They dont always align with the standard 24 hour clock.

Design 2: The Toilet Paper Time Scroll

The time would be displayed on toilet paper squares. As each hour passes the toilet swallows a square. Time literally goes down the drain. Its about disposable linear progression of time. Each hour is used up and flushed away.

Both designs are still pretty speculative. They are just in my head right now. But I am excited to actually design them out.

I think both designs deal with chronos. They track regular bodily functions. They mark linear time passing. But there is also something kairos about them. They focus on very specific opportune moments when nature calls.