Ever since Readymade Magazine got my brain churning on the possibilities of DIY clocks, I’d been toying with the idea of having the minute and hour hands rotate entire transparent clock faces — to create some sort of evolving image. That’s as far as I ever got with the idea, so I was pretty excited to see that someone else has effectively finished the thought.
The face of the Imbroglio clock consists of a soup of multi-colored shapes on transparent backgrounds, which rotate and convene hourly in such a way that the numerical representation of the hour is visible, however briefly. Definitely not the most functional clock, but endlessly appealing to my nerdy sensibilities. If it weren’t $120, I would be all over that shit.
Anyway, the point of all this is to put this thought out there so that other internet wanderers might stumble across it and inform me of similarly evolving clock faces. That’s all. [via]
Update:
This ‘bingo’ watch similarly plays with the idea of a rotating, semi-transparent clock face; and this binary clock implementation uses semi-transparent faces as well. The ‘Decider‘ watch also uses a face with transparent areas.
Even more examples: The insanely expensive ‘Opus 8’ wristwatch uses a face with extended pins that push up segments to create a pretty sweet analog / digital marriage. Nadine Grenier, a student at ESAD Strasbourg, made a kinetic installation consisting of 500 clockworks, the hands of which line up every 12 hours to form a sentence in french, which roughly translates to ‘Time passes, and every time the time passes, there is something that fades.’ Similarly, Christiaan Postma has designed a clock that uses dozens of synchronized hands to spell the current hour. Finally, an as yet unproduced prototype for a clock with a single hand, perpendicular to the plane of the face. The hour, minute, and second hands are created in shadow via three rotating lamps.
Aw, hell, why not more: Clock faces that rotate to form a digital representation of the time (And again, as a product from Art Lebadev; and again, as a gallery show, and another), a clock face that self-destructs over the period of 100 years, a clock face with each hand’s center point attached to the end point of the previous hand, an LCD video screen-as-clock-face that shows the hands being redrawn, a clock face that rotates as one piece, using gravity and a ball to mark time, and a clock face designed to be used as a scheduling whiteboard, with an eraser-equipped hour hand.