Industrious Clock

Made by Yugo Nakamura, the Industrious Clock is essentially a clock and calendar, telling both the time and the date at the moment of the viewing: which includes the year, month, day, hour, minute and second. However, instead of having the numbers simply flip from one to the other or change in a simple animation, all of them are being shown as written out in pencil and erased by hand. As a result, the numbers in the second timer are constantly being written and erased in a endless cycle, while the others take much longer to get changed. As a result, there is almost a hypnotic quality to how the numbers are written, erased and written again, making viewers have to shake themselves out of staring at it for too long. It is only when viewers first encounter the page that there is a second of frenetic activity, when the pencil and the eraser set the date to whatever the actual time is before going at its normal pace. If one thinks about it, Industrious Clock is a fairly simple Flash animation: only ten individual film clips are needed to write out the numbers and possibly some special coding is needed in order to tie in the clock aspect of the work to the actual date and time. However, because the numbers are apparently being written out, there seems to be an act of futility in how the person doing the writing is forever trapped in writing out the time, almost like some sort of Sisyphean punishment in Hell. As a result, there is a slight disconnect between knowing that this is already recorded animation and seeing it as actually being written out. I think that this directly related to class, mainly in its usage of Flash and especially in the time-based aspect of the work, mainly in that it is portraying time itself but done in the hands of a human.