Design an unconventional timepiece or device that explores a non-human or an ecological perspective of time. To start, choose a species, environment or infrastructural system or material you wish to research and explore. Develop a project that responds to one or more dynamic processes within your chosen context. You are encouraged to question basic assumptions about how time is mediated and represented. Ponder concepts like biological time (chronobiology), phenology, ultradian and infradian rhythms, solar and lunar cycles, infrastructural cycles, celestial time and sidereal time, geological time, psychological time or subjective time. Inform your design by reading about the history of timekeeping systems and devices, and their transformative effects.
Consider the following starting points:
- Study a specific ecosystem, species, technology, community group, activist group etc. Develop a clock for them, or in response to their dynamics.
- Investigate a system of infrastructure, explore its cycles and temporalities.
- Consider metabolic time from the perspective of different materials.
- Consider time as a relation between two entities. Explore concepts of relativity, resonance, dissonance, interference (constructive/destructive).
For inspiration, see the class readings as well as these useful archives of approaches to time keeping:
- A Timeline of Timelines: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/timelines.php
- A Minor History of Time without Clocks: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/foer.php
- Tools and technologies that may be useful for exploring time ( this is a working list).
- Here is a list of additional time projects for your consideration.
Deliverables:
You are to present your response to this brief in class on the Wednesday it is due. Documentation of your project in video or still imagery is also required. Please submit your project documentation to me via the slack or by adding your link to this sheet by the end of the week that the work is due. The documentation should include a short piece of reflective writing on your work (1-3 paragraphs). Please address:
- Describe your project in a sentence or two.
- What artists or research were you thinking about as you formulated the idea?
- Give some discussion of the context that your work is intended for eg. is it specific to a site? Is your work for a particular group of people? Does your work choreograph its audience in specific ways? Did you utilize interaction and why?
- What open questions did you have going in? How did making the work change or address these questions?
- If you were to do this again, what would you change to clarify or extend ?