Time Scroll

Time Scroll is a web browser-based 24 hour clock. Every increment of the 24 cycle, down to the second, is rendered to the browser. It starts with 00:00:00 at the top and ends with 23:59:59 at the bottom. Each second, the browser scrolls one tick downward to change the display of the current time. The location of the browser’s scroll bar gives you a general sense of where we are in time relative to the 24 hour cycle.

Time Scroll is written in Javascript and PHP.

[Time Scroll]

Thermal Clock

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We rely heavily on our vision to identify change. We see sand accumulating at the bottom of the hourglass. We see the minute hand rotate clockwise. How would our sense of time change if we cast time to another sense?

Thermal Clock is a timepiece that positions heat along a bar over a 24 hour cycle to tell time.

Using an array of peltier junctions, heat is emitted from a focused area moving from left to right along the bar over the course of a day.

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Thermal Clock from che-wei wang on Vimeo.

Cinematic Timepiece

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Time is our measure of a constant beat. We use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, etc. But what if we measured time against rituals, chores, tasks, stories, and narratives? How can we use our memory, prediction, familiar and unfamiliar narratives to tell time?

As a child, I remember using the length of songs as a way to measure how much time was left during a trip. A song was an appropriate period to easily multiply to get a grasp of any larger measure like the time left until we arrived to our grandmother’s place. The length of a song was also a measure I could digest and understand in an instant.

The first iteration of Cinematic Timepiece consists of 5 video loops playing at 5 different speeds on a single screen. The video is of a person coloring in a large circle on a wall.

The frame furthest to the right is a video loop that completes a cycle in one minute. The video to the left of the minute loop completes its cycle in one hour. The next completes in a day, then a month, then a year.

Through various iterations, we intend to experiment with various narratives and rituals captured in a video loop to be read as measures of time.

The software was written in OpenFrameworks for a single screen to be expanded in the future for multiple screens as a piece of hardware.

Cinematic Timepiece is being developed in collaboration with Taylor Levy.

Download the fullscreen app version [http://drop.io/cinematicTimepiece#]

Time in Six Parts

Time in Six Parts is a series of attempts to unravel and re-present time through alternative perspectives.  The hope is to demystify scales of time that are out of our immediate reach and explore new approaches to marking time.

In a Lifetime

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We often compare ourselves to friends, colleagues, relatives, idols, etc. on a scale of time that’s beyond our comprehension. Full of hope and objectives that are far into the future, we strive to achieve as much as our parents, friends, and heroes.
What do you plan to achieve in the next 5 years? 10 years? 20? How long will you live?

Though there are many unknowns, we share one lifetime as a common measure.

In a Lifetime is a website that visualizes individual achievements and milestones along the scale of one lifetime. Each point along the arc represents a milestone where the top (12th hour) is their moment of birth, the right quadrant (3rd hour) is a quarter through their life, the bottom (6th hour) is half way through their life, and so on. The mapping strips age as a parameter from individuals and scales lifespans to compare achievements of one life with another.

The website collects information about each individual through a publicly accessible interface. Input parameters are, author, date of birth, lifespan, milestone or note, and significance (0-100). Anyone who visits the site can enter information about an individual to be mapped. If one so desires, you can enter your predicted lifespan to compare personal milestones to others.

Some patterns emerge. Significant achievements are made between the half way point and the 3/4 point of their lives. Beyond the 3/4 point, nearly all individuals stop accruing achievements .
Around the half way point in their individual lives, Albert Einstein wrote the General Theory of Relativity, Constantin Brancusi completed the Kiss, Le Corbusier completed Villa Savoye, Leonardo Da Vinci drew the proportions of human figure after Vitruvious.

In a Lifetime was built using javascript, php, and mySQL.
(tested on firefox 3 and safari)

Haptic Clock

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The Haptic Clock is a small clock program for Java powered mobile phones. The clock conveys time through a sequence of vibrations so you never have to pull the phone out of your pocket to tell time. The idea behind it was to create a clock that would train my body to understand time better.
Long vibrations are the number of hours of the current time on a 12 hour clock, so 6pm and 6am are both 6 vibrations. The shorter vibrations are the number of minutes divided by 5. So 4 vibrations is 20 minutes and 7 vibrations is 35 minutes. Example: (3) long vibrations and (6) short vibrations means it’s 3:30. Just in case you do want to see the time, the screen displays the time with tick marks for hours, minutes and seconds.
Instructions: Press to vibrate the current time. Press ‘0’ to exit program. UP and DOWN to control the speed of vibrations. Time alerts (vibrations) will occur automatically every 0, 15, 30, 45 minutes on the hour as long as the program is running.  Press any key to vibrate the current time.  Move the joystick to change options.  Options include vibration speed and vibration frequency (time between automated vibration time alerts).

Current Version: 0.08
Released:5.24.2007
Creator: Che-Wei Wang
License: GNU Public License (source)
Download Beta: Haptic Clock 08.jad, Haptic Clock 08.jar
Beta means it may not work on your phone or worse, may break your phone. Install and use at your own risk.
Tested on: Nokia E70
Issues: J2ME drains the batteries. Looking for ways around it, or a more efficient platform.