Time

Class Website

Week 7 - Time Code 2

Midterm Project

Problems:
The magnet is not powerfull enough that it doesn’t hold anything through the acrylic.

Even though the magnet is not on an external force (me touching the object - in this case the paper clip) helps it fall down.

Solutions:

I think the power was not powerful enough to make the magnet powerful aswell. So, I’m added a 9V battery and power the arduino with 5V. Now the tension is much better.
But since the acrylic is not as thin, it still doesn’t hold well. I made a small circle and cut it. Now things fall!

I’m using the RTCLib library to get the time data and using DigitalWrite(HIGH or LOW) for the magnet. For the in class presentation I will probably set the time in a particular way that it’s in the class hours.

Link for demonstration

Week 6 - Seeing Time

Visit to HS-NY

I had so much fun there! I somehow like pocket watches and the collection there was really nice. I especially love the one on the left since the seconds are much more important than the hours. I didn’t understand why a doctor would rely more on the seconds but will ask Jeff in class for sure! (update: I asked abt this in class and apparently doctors can check pulses by reading the seconds, which makes total sense for those times)

The ornamental watches were really pretty that I can’t stop thinking about who use to wore these or use them. I love how watches also turned into something more fashionable rather than just was object. Also, just thinking about how people hand painted these tiny surfaces is crazy to me.

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Visual Inspiration for midterm

I love how things appear under the frosted glass/acrylic. I would love to create this effect aswell but not sure how would the wires looks underneath.

I started experimenting with the Keyestudio KS0320 Electromagnet Module. When my RTC arrives, what I want to do is to control the electromagnet with the time. Once the hour is passed the magnet will turn LOW and the petal will drop. Since I’m more comfortable with the 24 hour system, I was thinking more abot doing 24 petals but that would be too much work and can be expensive. I’ll either try to do 12 or even lower the number and represent something else.

The issue with the Electromagnet is it has a feature known as "holding force" or "remnant magnetism." Even when the power is turned off, some electromagnetic devices can maintain a residual magnetic field, which can hold objects like magnets in place to some extent. This effect is often due to the materials and design of the electromagnet. So, sometimes I’m not sure it the electroforce is HIGH or LOW.

At least it was easy to understand how to connect the magnet to the arduino, they had a nice pin-out diagram online. I bought anouther magnet but the shipment never went through. I know that this is not the best magnet out there but I’ll try to make it work!

Ps. Proud of my soldering job.

Week 5 - Time Machines

In-class demonstrations

Cameo - for cutting thin paper etc.

You need to download Silhouette Studio as software and import a .dxf model into it. You can either use templetemaker.nl to get premade boxes or use illustrator to design something.

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UV Printer - use CMYK and it’s original color swatches

The colored inks are transparent. If you print something on a green object, you’ll see the color of your material at the back. To avoid this, you should print white first since white is opaque. (If you want to create a feeling of opaqueness onto a clear material you would print white!)

Create different layers for each design and save them differently as PDF documents.

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Totally forgot to add my sundial so here’s my sundial:

First, I used the website that Jeff gave us as inspiration and created the sundial according to my home address and orientation to the sun. Then, test it out to see if it was working. It was 11:25-ish and I think it was close to accurate.

I didn’t like the shape of this geometric sundial and changed it into a half circle shape. I had acyrilic from last semester so decided to use it. I always love how it reflects to objects and surfaces. I laser cut the acyrilic and engraved the numbers onto it.

Week 4 - Time Code

Word of the week: fleetingness - the property of lasting for a very short time
I learned about this new word by reading this article about the fragility of time. I used this phrase when I was describing my flower idea! It also ties to my thesis idea so I’m glad it’s something that other people has thought about. (delicate and fragile nature of time) --- Link to the article “The Fragility of Time” by Lennon Campbell

Word from last weeks: hypomnema (Jo mentioned it during class) - According to Michel Foucault, "The hypomnemata constituted a material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. Hypomnemata has to do with the creation of a mode of preserving the memory of things that were read, thought, or heard over a period of time. One of the more common examples of hypomnemata is the time-honored tradition of keeping a memory book. In times past, people chose to engage is this form (notebooks) of hypomnemata as a means of creating works that had to do with home health remedies, family recipes, and personal histories. (ref: https://www.languagehumanities.org/what-are-hypomnemata.htm)

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Office Hour w/ Jeff - Ideas on how might the flower clock work

Since we talked about easing (smoothly transition a variable from one value to another in a set time) during class, it might be a nice way of representing the petals in a way that it looks more natural. In real life, nothing is sharp/just black or white/either 0 or 100 - so, I should think anout that aspect when thinking of designing the whole thing.

With the p5 sketch,
the petals can fade (rather than disappearing directly after time has passed)
the petals can drop with an ease.
the petals can drop with ease and then change color when it’s on the ground (fall-ish feeling)
*check if p5 has a distinction of am/pm

Links (you can click on them)
suncalc for js
greensock ease examples

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Coding Challenge

References

lerpColor();
fading bg colors
creating an eased animation

second(), minute(), hour() -> p5 clock
Well, it definitely took me a while to remimber how to code :( Also, in p5 -- times is between 0-23. At least that’s how the hour() function works.

function draw() {
background(220);
if (hour() == 18) {
fill(0, 255 - minute() * 3, 0); }
else if (hour() < 18) { fill(0, 255, 0); }
else { fill(0, 255 - 59 * 3, 0); }

if (hour() < 19) {
ellipse(300, 100, 30, 60); }
else if (hour() == 19 && minute() == 0 && second() < 15) {
ellipse(300,100 + (450 / 15) * second(),60,30); } else {
ellipse(300,550,60,30); }
}

Link to the sketch

The sketch is just simple but I wanted to make something that fades before it falls. So, the first portion of the if statement is controlling the fill color and it’s linked to the change of hour. It was 18:00 when I was doing it so I used 18 as a reference. I’ll probably add all the hours + petals into the code after I find a way to animate the fall of a petal better.

The second half is about the y position of the petal. I want it to start falling down during the first 15 seconds of the hour. Also, this is the petal that exists on the top, so it’s more vertical. When it falls, it lands in a more horizontal shape so the angle should also change. I just did it by changing the r size of the ellipse, but will work on the angles too.

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Sundial

I started off with using sundialzone.com to figure out the longitude and latitute and how the sun appears on where I live. The website then created a wall sundial format that can be used in my appartment. I tested out a couple of times and it (partially) works! It’s not completely accurate for sure but gives you the right interval. I’ll turn this into a wall sundial that can exist outside the appaartment.

Week 3 - The Design of Time
The part about “Bad Clocks” - clocks that attempt to speak to some aspect of time – psychological, cultural, personal – beyond the simply literal - made me think about this book that I own called “Dear Data”. It’s a great example of data visualization and it often times visualizes time in different ways. Tufte’s work explains how to keep things simple and honest as possible; the book explains how they visualized data with legends and “how to read it?” parts. I believe these make it honest and sincere! Here’s an example from the book focusing on time and clocks.

Dear Data is a year-long, analog data drawing project by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec. Each week, and for a year, they collected and measured a particular type of data about their lives. At the end, it turned out to be a “personal diary” of some sort.

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Also, how crazy is Bartosz Ciechanowski’s in-depth visual representations. Last year, I had to tear apart a clock and was never able to bring it back together because it had so many gears etc. I respect clock makers and people who designs mechanical movements, it’s incredible.

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I liked the term “calendar synesthesia” and definitely will look more into it because I’m also a kind of person who needs to “see” a calendar or time-related information and I often have colors attached to musical notes and days. I draw my own calendar because seeing it on an app is never enough and I often times misread them.

This reminds me of this girl on TikTok who crochets temperatures of each day and creates these a-year long temperature blankets.

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Time Keeper Designs

Inspiration and Look&Feel

Week 2 - The Ecliptic

-- OUT OF TOWN -- sundial project is on week 4

Week 1 - The Nature of Time

Timekeeper Design Hunt

1. Yuge Zhou - when the East of the day meets the West of the night

This is an experimental documentary film about the physical and emotional distances and split realities between her homeland, China, and her present life in the United States. She filmed the setting and rising suns in two continuous takes, recording the same relative moment of the Pacific coast, from opposite sides of the planet. Both rock formations symbolize figures standing on the edge of the ocean, contemplatively gazing into the distance and through the passage of time.

2. Prayer Time

There’s an interesting beauty in the prayer times that happens 5 times a day. Coming from a Muslim country, Turkey, we are accustomed to hearing the prayer and use prayer times as a clock/a way to understand approximately what time is it. Even though the prayer times change accourding to sun movements, people can still use it as a way to tell a story/set a meeting time etc.

3. Ryan McGinness - hour of power

This is an hour-long video of the artist drinking one shot of beer every minute for an hour.

4. Felix Gonzalez-Torres - Perfect Lovers

It consists of two clocks that start in synchronization. Slowly and expectedly, they fall out of time. This is caused by running out of batteries as well as the nature of the mechanism. It symbolizes the artist’s HIV-positive partner Ross Laycock and his dawdling decline and inevitable death from AIDS. The two clocks represent two mechanical heartbeats, which are illustrative of the two lives ordained to fall out of sync and carry moving poetry about personal loss and the temporal nature of life.

5. Humans since 1982 - ClockClock24

The duo developed this digital concept into a hybrid between a work of kinetic art and a wall clock. As the hands of the clock move, the letters and numbers tick their way into existence. Every time has a meaning —by making its shift perceptible, we can come to truly appreciate its passing.

6. Raqs Media Collective - Escapement

The work involves two dozen clocks—one for each time zone in the world. Perhaps the most memorable element of this work is one of the 24 clocks that is unlike the rest. The clock that is on New Delhi time displays words instead of numbers. They’ve been chosen to evoke feelings and sensations – to suggest mood swings, emotional rhythms, and midnight epiphanies.

7. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Doomsday Clock

The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the likelihood of a human-made global catastrophe, in the opinion of the members of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.[1] Maintained since 1947, the clock is a metaphor for threats to humanity from unchecked scientific and technological advances. A hypothetical global catastrophe is represented by midnight on the clock, with the Bulletin's opinion on how close the world is to one represented by a certain number of minutes or seconds to midnight, assessed in January of each year. The clock's original setting in 1947 was seven minutes to midnight. It has since been set backward eight times and forward 17 times for a total of 25. The farthest time from midnight was 17 minutes in 1991, and the nearest is 90 seconds, set on January 24, 2023.

Time

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