Looking Clock
Like John Wood (Deaf School and Goldsmiths) said “It’s all about time!”. Perhaps more recently networks have afforded a better framework with which to understand relational temporalities, but nevertheless a lot of my research remains about time. And since a number of projects have popped up recently in which time is a central concern I’ve decided to recover five pieces of ‘critical design’ that pointed to the legacy of a clock-orientated society. There are a few papers dotted between the pieces, some written over ten years ago so forgive their simplicity!
The Looking Clock, 1999
Ricoeur’s ‘the time of the soul’ and ‘time of the world’ have become one of many mechanisms to explore what the impact and clock time has had on us as a society, and whilst we may criticise and explore the resulting tensions and slippages few attempts have been made to reconcile some of the consequences. The ©Looking Clock is a digital art piece that could function as a product but at present represents an alternative to delivering time and ultimately moving between lived time and universal time.
The ©Looking Clock Very simply it is an analogue clock that only reveals the time and continues working when a person is looking at it. Once a person moves away from it, then the clocks movement stops immediately. However, as soon as another person looks at it, it restarts and quickly catches up with universal time. As a consequence of the experience of using the Looking Clock a number of changes occur in the relationship between ourselves and our notions of time. Immediately it becomes clear that it is now the job of the clock to tell us THE time and not for us to understand and catch up with it. This empowers ourselves in the traditional equation of universal time over lived time, and although we do not replace or reinvent the ‘time of the world’, our ‘time of the soul’ becomes acknowledged and I would suggest elevated to the same status. In the process of arriving at the clock and observing the hands move to catch up with itself, we also expand the time between the instants of it being used to tell the time which must be the present, and enable ourselves to acknowledge history and future as the difference between the time past, an otherwise impossible phenomenon with a clock that is always located in the instant.
Excuse the quality – it will settle down after a couple of seconds. It’s a long movie, but watch as the person on the right waits for 2 minutes whilst the clock hands are still, then moves into view of the clock and the clock hands speed forward taking him to the actual time (see the actual time on the video frame).
Lastly and possibly the most sensitive aspect of the experience is the discovering of other peoples lived time. As we approach the clock it has clearly stopped, and will only restart when we are directly in front of it. Once we understand that it is catching up with us to tell us the time, we understand that the former time displayed was someone else’s lived time, their present. A concept that goes beyond touching archaeological artefacts and memorabilia and is much closer to meeting an apparition from the past. In the context of keywords such as Participation and Connection, The Looking Clock and it’s potential research identifies an everyday event that seems to be at the centre of an experience through which the individual is affected in a phenomenological and conceptual manner. In the moment of reconciling our lived time against the universal we are both choosing to connect and participate at the same. Although it can be said that this process of engagement is a regular occurrence for the human, reading the time and in particular having it read to you by the Looking Clock makes us keenly aware of the separation between a conscious moment of our own and one that is shared or acknowledged by the rest of the world. A short paper was written on the Looking Clock for the Problems of Participation and Connection conference in 2001