The crowdsourced video clock

The Flickr Clock is a visualizer of Flickr videos arranged in sequence of when they were shot. The nav involves selecting from a landscape of frame-grabbed strips with an hourly breakdown graph underneath. I enjoyed the bison on the roadway by i8godzilla and the iced tea sugar tornado by joshlowenstein. Developed by San Francisco studio Stamen, who also concocted the geotagging app Mappr. One quibble: presumably you start looking at today’s videos, but it’s unclear. And it’s also not obvious how to look back in previous days, if possible at all.

via laughing squid

The Shape of Time

On Feb 24 David Reinfurt, copropietor of “Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore” Dexter Sinister and journal Dot Dot Dot, was the first to disquisite at the 2009 D-Crit lecture series (curated by us students–good on ya Fred + Katie). Two items of significance–if by significant I mean of primary interest to graduate students–transpired.

First, I think I finally get Dot Dot Dot a bit more. David’s preoccupation with modes of information generation and dissemination is the basis of the content. Oh and the cover of #17 is an outtake of #16’s Genesis P-Orridge sitting. There, I sewed it up for you.

Second, I had been banging my head against the wall to find some underpinning for an exhibition concept, something about recursive time in the design history and morphology. Eternal return wave theory not particle theory yadda yadda. David pops up a slide of the cover of a book, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things by George Kubler.

I’m still going through the book and enthusiastically taking passages out of context to suit my ends. “No formal sequence is ever really closed out by the exhaustion of all its possibilities in a connected series of solutions”–perfect. The influence of this academic book seems to put it in a league with others that broke out of their primary categories and into the broader intellectual ferment of the sixties–think Banham’s Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, McLuhan’s Understanding Media. Beyond helping with this curatorial concept, it will be another node in my disorganized considerations of time.

Perhaps not unrelated in this regard is my observation that the older cover blows away the new one. 

Radial time

Muji Chronotebook

I am not here to praise Muji; they don’t need it. Yeah yeah it’s hard to resist their  accessible minimalism. I too wish I could wear grey, black, and white as my austere uniform every day, but can’t pull it off.

But their Chronotebook is notable in its simple tweak of the rectilinear grid that defines most diaries. These pages are radial: each day is represented by a spread with a circle on each page, the verso for AM and the recto for PM. It’s truer to the way we usually visualize time, as a clock face rather than graph paper. Thinking about time differently is a worthy endeavor, and it can start here.