Hello all

It's been a while. I keep forgetting to post. This is not something I normally do (blogging I mean) so I find it difficult to keep up with. It was suggested to me that I take recordings of people and use them and what they say about time. I have started taking recordings, though I am not sure if I will use them. I'll try to post a lot in the near future to help make up for lost time. Later.

Catching Up

Ok, so I was gone for awhile, and because of that I was away from the computer and I was unable to post for awhile. I will now be sort of updating you on my thoughts in chronological order (more or less). I was getting worried about the cost and availability of the components as well as my technical ability to work with small electronics and gear work pocket watches. One possible solution that I thought of was using a clock much larger  than an actual pocket watch, which would make the parts cheaper and easier to work with than pocket watch sized devices. After thinking about this for some time I have decided to expand the scope and goal of my project. Rather than building an actual clock I want to use digital medium to create some kind of video that is representative of time, peoples perceptions of it, our cultural or historical definitions of it, and our physical limitations of perceiving it.
It is a neat idea I think, there are cultures that have different (or none at all) definitions of time and how to measure it. Our bodies can only perceive interruptions so fast before we do not notice the interruption at all. Is that a limit of our sense or our perceptions of time? What we seem to consider the present (ie. knowing something that is happening without recalling it though memory) of several seconds, where we can perceive the passage of time down to a scale of milliseconds. If you are interested in some of these topics here are a few links to websites with neat time perception information http://www.andersoninstitute.com/perception-of-sequence-and-duration.html http://library.thinkquest.org/06aug/01010/culturalAspects.html.Its a neat topic, but I am not sure how to represent it. I was thinking of having something with speeding up and slowing down, perhaps have a narration of some kind to talk about the topic, pose the philosophical questions. The voice isn't the focus so I was thinking about using a digital voice. I would splice clouds moving fruit rotting reversing video, there are a lot of things I could do, but I'm not sure what I should do so if any of you out there in internet land have an suggestions, let me know

Watch Research

Alright, I have been looking into the watch idea. I have more or less been convinced that it is a good idea but I still have a couple reservations, mainly the cost of the components. That aside I have found several youtube videos that show, but not really help with the construction of these types of things. I recently found this blog http://timewitharduino.blogspot.com/2010/06/introducing-arduino-analog-watch.html that does alot of time stuff with arduino microcontrollers. It will hopefully be informative. I have also considered doing a few other things in the same theme but perhaps less expensive. I am formulating ideas about "steampunk" time devices, if I decide on something I'll let you know.

Choosing a Project

So I have thought about this for the past several days and I am unsure what I should do as my art project. There is a song, deify by disturbed, that always makes me envision a group of people in a rock opera like setup and I first considered making a video of this but I think that is beyond my scope. I was thinking about creating a watch, a union of digital and classical parts, sort of a...digital/gear pocket watch. An interesting kind of union of old and new things but I'm not sure if that's what this class is looking for. I'd like to learn more about what the video programs can do before I commit to anything let alone a video project. There are some Interesting non-realizable math things that might be cool to make visualizations of. Maybe something that evolves? I don't know, I guess we'll talk about it in class, maybe hearing with other people want to do will be helping in providing me greater direction.