Abstract Clocks

I recently talked to Electric Object about building something on their platform for their artists program, this is what I came up with.

When I was looking into what I could do on the Electric Object, the biggest thing that stood out to me was that not many people were taking advantage of the fact that it can run a browser, and as such, can display something made programmatically on the fly, or change with time. Instantly I wanted to do something with time.

Over the years, I’ve amassed a large collection of clocks and timers on CodePen, which served as a big inspirational source. The general idea here, is that the clocks would be abstract and difficult to read, but after spending a week with them it would be as easy to read as a regular clock, in a sense, the same way people are able to read time from the sun.

The theme for the clocks came as a combination of the original circular clock face, but instead using gradients as clock hands. From here, a lot of experimentation and explorations occured, resulting in the 5 “types” of clock.

You can read about how to understand each clock, on this little web page … some of them are a little trickier to get a handle on than the others, but ultimately learnable.

➶ Abstract Clocks Demo’s & Instructions
➶ Abstract Clocks code on Github
➶ Abstract Clocks on Electric Object