My experimental clock depicts the idea of people always getting ready for their workday, whether that is an early morning shift at a coffee shop or a late night shift at a hospital. This shows how people run on different timelines in regards to when people work and when they have “free time”. You might be working while someone is at the beach, but when they are working, you might be at home watching a movie with your family. It is all relative to your unique circumstances. For this sketch, the apartment walls and windows are lighter or darker depending on the time. We have early morning, the day time, evening and night time. For the “night workers” the lights are on until 12 pm and stay on until 4 am, and for the morning people, the lights are on until 6 am and stay on until 10 pm.
My three ideas for the experimental clock was generative dots, “There is always someone working”, and using a hand to tell time. For the dot idea, I was thinking that every second there would be a dot that would appear on the screen and every minute there would be a different colored dot that would appear on the screen. Along with the dots would be different thoughts that popped up, with the thoughts being more “random” with the seconds and more “reflective” thoughts for the minute dots. “There is always someone working” is a thought I have alot, especially when I was in highschool and I worked at an optometry office. I would often be at work during holidays, while my parents or friends used the holiday to travel, go to the beach, or hang out. At the same time however, when I would get off of work and use the evenings to go to dinner or the mall with my friends, there would be people working at the spaces while I was “enjoying my time”. The last idea was inspired by my creative ML elective, where we messed around with ml5.js hand-tracking and I made a project that forced the user to “slow” down and take the time to follow a set of trailing dots. I wanted to alter the project so that it was more focused on the concept of “reclaiming/appreciating time”. Ultimately, I picked the “There is always someone working” concept because I could have it be more “abstract”, with the lights in an apartment complex being on or off depending on the respective window. I also still have this thought looming in the back of my head when I feel like I haven’t worked hard enough or as motivation to keep working.
At first, I was having a hard time thinking about an “experimental” way to tell time. It took me a while to change my mindset from actually telling time to the passing of time, and how I could represent the passage of time in a way that I relate/think about alot. I think that in general, my perception of how people experience time has expanded as I was making this project.
