Time! It’s all around us, and we’re getting more and more obsessed with it; or rather with the lack of it. Inspired by this I have begun ‘Multichronography’, a project to depict the passage of time in a variety of different ways (varichronography?). My first thoughts are to explore new ways of visualising time, rather than the standard clock-face or digital time display. How can we break away from these numerical measures? The basis of our time-keeping lies in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, so there’s an astronomical edge to explore as well. This is very much the kind of project which will evolve naturally, with each idea leading me to the next possibility.

This will be added to the ‘Projects’ section of the site in the coming weeks, but here’s a sneak preview: ‘Loading Tomorrow’ (Beta) reminds us how important accuracy in time-keeping is to us. If all we had was an unreliable estimate of time, modern society would fall apart. Perhaps this is why these ‘estimated time remaining’ status bars irritate us so much!  This would not always have been a problem, however, particularly in ancient rural farming, where individual days were far less important than measuring the passage of seasons. This is a forward-looking applet, treating today as a platform for creating tomorrow, but I won’t bore you with the metaphors there (I’m sure you’re clever enough to make the links yourself)…

Our lagoon of randomness is expanding…

(p.s. Once the project is up and running I’ll probably release at least some of the source code for the various applets I bodge together)