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Fashion’s idea of time accentuate the “now”. Georg Simmel wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century (the door to the century of fashion) that Fashion accentuates the “now” — as though it was a kind of “watershed” where some things end and others begin. Fashion is an unending parade that...

Natural Time Dexter Edwards

In contemporary life the clock is ever-present. It is the first thing we see on the lock screens of our phones, and always in the corners of our computer screens. For better or for worse, the clock is the instrument keeping the world in sync.

Digital electronics normalise the logic of the clock, the logic imposes a precise structure on the loose and elusive nature of time, a clock gives time a form, one that is measurable, predictable, absolute.

Natural Time presents a rethinking of what a form for time could be, one that is–in the words of John Cage–“less like an object, and more like the weather”1, less strict and more relative. A form that can embody the nuances and subtleties of time that clock as we know cannot.

Natural Time speculates on a fluid representation of time, and what we talk about when we talk about ‘the moment’. It advocates for more performance, chance and chaos theory in digital design practice, which, generally speaking, represents a “pathetically narrow” range of emotion.2

References

1. “Less like an object, more like the weather” is quoted from Chance Conversations: An Interview with Merce Cunningham and John Cage.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNGpjXZovgk.

2. Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects, Dunne & Raby, 2002.

Figures

1. Natural Time, 2014. A portrait of the time in Wellington, New Zealand at the time of writing. 2:35:20pm, 24th September 2014.

2. Flower Clock, 1751. Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy, notes in hisPhilosophia Botanica that if one possessed a sufficiently large variety of aequinoctal species, it would be possible to tell time simply by observing the daily opening and closing of flowers.

Inspired by clouds and lava lamps - an updated, more readily active aesthetic.

The representation of time acts an ideological framework.

Redesigning a clock is a political act.

I am trying to think about time as a spectrum rather than linear narrative. This diagram represents a way of considering multiple factors that affect the way we think about time.

Early test ‘visualising’ weather.

The digital wristwatch counts time’s passage in the oscillations of a quartz crystal; the atomic clock tallies the resonance of cesium atoms; the pendulum clock, the hourglass, and the clepsydra all transform the force of gravity into a measurement of time. But while nature may mete out time’s passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earth’s rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.

- A Minor History Of / Time without Clocks

Parisi: For a New Computational Aesthetics: Algorithmic Environments as Actual Objects.

“Of course, time has not always been thought of as something linear and unchanging, but could only be imagined that way after Enlightenment thinkers had gained access to accurate pendulum clocks that ran independently of perpetual maintenance or weather conditions. Seen as a kind of walk-in clock, Network Time could have a similar power to shape our experience and understanding of temporality. In contrast to our idea of time as progressing in unflinching lockstep, the network time proposed by Hadjidjanos is so susceptible to individual touch that a growing number of single alterations can eventually cancel out each other’s visible effects. The more data is exchanged, the faster the blinking gets, and the harder it becomes to differentiate between individual illuminations.”

— http://www.spiroshadjidjanos.net/network_time/

Think with Me about Your Extension of Now by Olafur Eliasson

"Now" has been stretched to last longer and longer. We–and I mean the human race–have, unlike most animals, the ability to link one moment to the next, creating our sensation of presence. Time flows continuously in one motion, so to speak, with each moment naturally related to the next. Husserl added that our expectations for the coming moment and the memory of the one just passed are all members of our "now." If not, our remarkable ability to orient ourselves would probably not have developed to this extent. Husserl’s assumption was that "now" can only be linked to a subject whose expectations and memory set the parameters of experience and orientation—in a space.

Still thinking with me, we can say that my understanding of our time is necessarily within my own time, so that my now is inside of yours, or, finally, your now is my surroundings (and vice versa). So since our “now” has been extended in time, a discussion about “here” must arise—in particular when talking about spatial issues such as your surroundings. The familiar “now and here,” also known as “nowhere,” might just as well be “now and there.” Since the subject certainly moves around (in a space), there should be no doubt about our ability to orient ourselves not only in the nearby past and future, but also in the space that will enter in a moment or is on the map of yesterday’s activities. Our society is laid out for this extended orientation anyway, being organized as it is out of the principles of predictability and avoiding surprises (think about traffic safety). Our surroundings are organized to be moved in without necessarily just being “here” or “there” but rather with a sense of coming from up there, being here, and soon being down there. Imagine if we were only to orient ourselves in Barnett Newman’s “Nowhere.” Our brain would become aphasic like a strobe lamp, experiencing our world as an infinite number of suspended static moments. This does not, like Newman assumed, bring you closer to some shared primordial state with your strange certainty still kept. In fact there is nothing outside of us, only cultural constructs. Your time and my time. Even Einstein’s desire to encapsulate us in his objective time was nothing but a then-practical cultivation of our surroundings. Practical in the sense that you now know that time is gravitational, so that when standing on top of the Twin Towers in New York, so-called time is one second longer in a hundred million years compared to standing on the street. The practical benefits of our collective cultivation of our surroundings is beyond discussion. Otherwise, we would be like Jim Carrey’s Truman, I suppose. So how long is “now” and where does “there” end? One frontier of “now and there” is our weather forecast, with all its weather people and predictions. Meteorology, in feudal times a matter of life and death, originated from a real need due to its ability to prolong the “now” to include tomorrow’s weather, taking our much too suspended reality for a pleasant ride into the future. Like a time traveler, weather predictions are able to get a small part of the yet abstract future and include it in our cultivated sense of space. Turning farmers’ sensitivity into science, complexity and unpredictability have cultivated the largest off all collective awarenesses—the weather. If anything is collective, the weather map outscores it by far. The only competition is TV reports on the most recent increase in the stock market curves. In the western world as we know it, the relevance of weather forecasts has decreased proportionally with the decline in the importance of the agricultural economy. On network news stations, the stock market news, mostly right before the weather, has eaten its way into the ever-shortening and faster-spoken weather forecasts. And as you notice, the daily stock update followed by the weather forecast forms a perfect (time)frame of reference for the fact that the recent past and future belong to your now. The recent past (the daily state of the stock markets) and the immediate future (the prediction of the weather) forms today’s perfect collective, cultivated Now. “Now” is eating calendar pages and digesting the upcoming weather into a daily dump of stock rates. Cultivation of a collective sense of time and space works, as we see, through representation. The weather forecast is our mediated experience—thermostats letting us know if we are freezing, or the wind-meter telling us if and from where the wind is blowing. Through the representational layers, our sensation of time and space (now and there), its tactility evacuated, for instance, by TV and thermostats, enables us to orient ourselves more productively as long as we are aware of the level of representation we are at: that the temperature is shown by the thermostat and not by our senses feeling a chill on the skin. Mediations can be infinite and only form a threat when you mistakenly believe that time and space are objective. Like when you are elsewhere and assume you are here. Just like Truman.

Paintings by Anoka Faruqee

Chaos Theory in nature — the idea that chaotic patterns transcend one field of study from biology, philosophy, mathematics, the idea that simple initial conditions will dynamic patterns, and that these dynamics follow a shared logic. (Gleick, 1997)

I would like to transfer the logic of these paintngs into a concept for a way of measuring surf and atmosphere using the Moire effect, informed by the choas. The micro movements of one layer of circles will create marco-movement with the optical effects in the mind of the viewer.

Vision deceives–or fixes?–the visual problem and you see the whole of the composition rather than the parts.

Could these images be set into time and add an extra dimension to the felt?

Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy, divides the flowering plants into three groups: the meteorici, which change their opening and closing times according to the weather conditions; the tropici, which change their opening and closing times according to the length of the day; and the aequinoctales, which have fixed opening and closing times, regardless of weather or season. Linnaeus notes in his Philosophia Botanica that if one possessed a sufficiently large variety of aequinoctal species, it would be possible to tell time simply by observing the daily opening and closing of flowers. He comments, to the consternation of several local horologists, that his floral clock is so accurate that it “could put all the watchmakers in Sweden out of business.” Though Linneaus seems never to have actually planted an horologium florae, or flower clock, his plan is later taken up with great passion by a handful of nineteenth-century gardeners, who often arrange a dozen or more species in the manner of a circular clock face.

- A Minor History Of / Time without Clocks

Rainbow Brush

In what ways can one think of time?

Change

A feeling

Conditional

Cause and Effect

Chance Encounters

Memories and Expections

A way forward

A schedule

"Casually determined linear relations"

Evolution

A dialouge

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