Liberating Clocks

Drawing on the ethos of slow for inspiration for both outputs and processes, such work often seeks to support more contemplative experiences, to encourage a wider environmental awareness and to reshape everyday behaviors. The assumption that time is speeding up out of control has led to a number of examples of redesigned clocks. One such clock is The Present, which features a single hand that rotates around a dial once per year. The colors on the dial move through blues, greens, yellow and reds, representing the seasons. In explaining the impetus for the clock, its creator Scott Thrift writes that ‘our whole lives we look up to the clock and see time as something that we’re losing’.

As an alternative to this, The Present offers a way of rooting oneself in a time that operates on a different scale, placing the viewer in a ‘present’ that lasts longer than a second. Arguing that ‘we’ve limited our perception to a single way of measuring time’, Thrift’s clock reminds us that there is always more than one kind of time, and that, like those making decisions over whether to use UTC or an alternative, there may well be opportunities to choose otherwise. Importantly, Thrift’s aim is not to do away with mainstream clock time altogether, but rather to introduce greater variety to the ways we use and tell time, with the holistic time of The Present offering a counterpoint to the segmented time of the regular clock.