Experimental Clock

Description

NOTE: refresh for different noodle effects

This is an experimental clock that captures my own sense of the abstract and experiential time-keeping that we all seem to follow. This abstraction of time is based purely on our experience of our moment-to-moment life and has often been the topic of both science and philosophy.

Einstein once said "Einstein once said “sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute; sit on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like many hours". My hot girl is food of course and my internal time-keeping for the day runs almost sub-consciously based on the meals I've had and when I've had them. Unless i have my breakfast it doesn't feel like it's 10 am, nevermind that it's noon aready and unless I've had lunch it doesn't feel like it's 2 pm. I have captured this experiential encapsulation of time into the single moment, in my clock, by miniaturizing the day (which runs on my meal clock) into an hour. The hour into a minute, while seconds move the same as an experience of enjoying food.

The time of the day has been completely abstracted for the user's experience on the mouse movement as a gradient for daylight. Minutes are shown as meals, in gaps of 10 minutes. They depict the hours experienced as a function of thhe last meal. The seconds are shown in real-time (seconds) as a spaghetti noddle, highlighting my forever obsession with food.

Design Process

I first drew out the concept as sketches on how I could use the idea of meals as an internal and automatic time-keeping mechanism. Once i had the idea finalised, i re-drew the final sketch (below), which I would base my p5 sketch on. I used perlin noise for the wiggle of the noodle.

Reflection

This assignment helped me acquire new skills and a new-found appreciation of mathematics all around us, which can help us code nature-identical phenomena. It also helped me grasp how real-time values can be used to make our sketch respond to the live time of the day using the hour(), minute(), second(), millis() and frameCount() functions.

Credits

Xin Xin and Katherine Moriwaki's Critical Computation tutorials on YouTube and Sean's Lab session helped with this assignments.
Sean helped me with the mathematics for the perlin noise used in the wiggle of the noodle, in making it look realistic in its movement.
Below is the reference for perlin noise used:
https://p5js.org/examples/math-noise-wave.html

Meal images are free-stock images.