{"id":3015,"date":"2026-06-13T10:26:47","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T10:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chrisspeed.net\/?page_id=3015"},"modified":"2026-06-13T10:26:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T10:26:47","slug":"looking-clock","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/chrisspeed.net\/?page_id=3015","title":{"rendered":"Looking Clock"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Like John Wood (Deaf School and Goldsmiths) said \u201cIt\u2019s all about time!\u201d. 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<\/em>. And since a number of projects have popped up recently in which time<\/em> is a central concern I\u2019ve decided to recover five pieces of \u2018critical design\u2019 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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Looking Clock, 1999<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ricoeur\u2019s \u2018the time of the soul\u2019 and \u2018time of the world\u2019 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 \u00a9<\/sup>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The\u00a0\u00a9<\/sup>Looking Clock<\/em>\u00a0Very 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 \u2018time of the world\u2019, our \u2018time of the soul\u2019 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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