Flash Clock - 10feb2004

This is a screencapture of a cool background (for just the background check this pic and this other one in blue) together with a flash clock I made that tells the time through colors. I kept this set as my wallpaper for a really long time and I still like it.

The clock, an experiment, works as follows: At midnight it starts all grey, and throughout the next 10 minutes a (random) rectangle changes color (smoothly) to red. This repeats until at exactly 1AM the clock is all red, now every 10 min. a rectangle changes to blue, and so on.

There are 6 colors (in order): grey, red, blue, green, yellow and pink. So at 6AM, when the clock is all pink, what happens? It starts all over again, now every 10 min. a rectangle changes to grey and at 7AM all of them will be grey. This goes on and on, resulting in a day of 4 cycles: 0-6AM, 6AM-12AM, 12AM-6PM, 6PM-0.

No, you can't tell the time exactly just by looking at the clock. First, any state of the clock can represent 4 different times (as the example in the next paragraph illustrates). Besides this, you can't really tell exactly what minute it is since only every 10 minutes the clock changes state clearly. So until a rectangle completes changing color, you're left to guess at the exact time by checking how faded into the new color it already is. It is a context clock and in this sense it reminds me of the 120-words Toki Pona language.

Example: The pictured clock show's that it's either 3:30AM, 9:30AM, 3:30PM or 9:30PM because green is the fourth color and yellow the fifth one.

I like the clock because I think it's beautiful and simple (though difficult to explain in words), and because I like the idea of time as color and time as cycles (4 every day).

If it sounds interesting to you (it is), I'll be happy to send it to you.