Experimental Clock

Description

The Climb, 2020

Red climbs the hill every second, blinking during its last ten steps. Green rises on the minute, flashing when it has ten left. Blue waits for Green with patience, stacking after the fifty ninth minute has completed. On the final hour of the day, Blue blinks with passion. Highly reccomend playing this song while viewing the clock.

Design Process

The concept for this week was more of a formal study of universalized time and was inspired by the abstract expressionist work of Piet Mondrian and Agnes Martin (images shown below, respectively). I wanted to play with composition, motion, the notion of stacking, and blinking effects to abstractly represent time. Process was tumultuous (see early sketch below)! It started with laying out the "hill" composition and then coding the seconds with secondPos() and using IF statements and boolean variables to make the red ball blink during the last 10 seconds. This logic was applied to the minutes and hours of the piece, but instead thinking of a chain that creeps upwards in the composition to suggest the "accumulation" of time.

Reflection

This clock was very rewarding to produce but I feel there are some kinks to smoothen out. The precision of the minutes stack needs to be perfected some more but the overall vision and concept are there. It would be neat to play with frameCount for the seconds ball and have it slide up the hill in a smoother way, rather than incremental steps. I want to explore more clock concepts and play with other visualization tools in the program - fun brief!