Sub-Spaced.com > Art > MA MMID

Steve Thompson	MaMMID
Time Report	Darren Stevens
Monday 16th December 2002

 

Report

For the commencement of the ‘Time’ project, an initial period of research was sought in order to gain a grounding in the concept of Time. The research was not based on any particular question or questions in mind, but to purely seek a concept that Time could be approached through.

 

Research

The research was initially based on several articles within the journal ‘Scientific American’, which focused on differing approaches and views towards Time, this lead me towards the internet and a search for more specific information related to World times, their relationships to each other and their construction through history.

At this stage in the project, time was now deemed to be of a quantity and not a specific qualifiable concept.

In dealing with idea of world times and their construction through planetary revolutions, I sought further information principally detailing about planetary revolutions in the solar system as a whole. The data that I primarily gained towards this subject was taken through several of the NASA web sites.

 

In developing from this stage and the knowledge that planetary revolutions, and henceforth time, vary widely throughout the solar system, I sought to find other ideas related to the length of time. One site in particular that I found was ‘New Net Time’. The concept of time developed through this project focused on planetary degrees of Longitude, giving a universal time everywhere on the planet. Useful for finding the time in other countries this method prevented the user from gaining an understanding of distance between countries through time difference, for all times were the same.

 

Development

The ideas that I gained through this launched in me the desire to move away from the ‘one time fits all’ concept and towards an area of individual time per person, initially focussing on myself.

 

In what aspect do I devise time based upon myself?

Do I base it on sleep patterns, daylight hours, working strategies?

Do I need to include minutes, hours, days etc?

The list could be extended to focus on further aspects of my life.

And in what sense would I ground an idea based upon an aspect of my life?

These were questions that I was faced with, and with no possibility of grounding one idea as opposed to another, a new basis for devising Time had to be sought.

 

In this sense continuing with the idea of disrupting universal time and creating individual time, the idea of time was now focussed as being an individual passage of a measurable quantity.

But how long is time itself?

With no understanding of how to create a length of time or how long time it is to be without having to ground the reason, time now occupies a fluctuating area of it’s passage and acknowledgement alone, for time does not tell you how long (unless through a stopwatch), but when a certain point has been achieved.

 

How long is time? That’s for the user to quantify through the passage of time.

 

The movement from quantification of time (that of seconds, hours etc) to the passage of time (a single reiterated unit of time) has resulted from a desire to pursue the non universal absolutism of time and its individual length in relation to habitation and human cerebral clocks, and the acknowledgement that time is devised towards the singular  standard for unit length in relation to habitation and henceforth social and economic conditions.

 

Through the inability to define a singular or universal criteria to ground the ideas within, it has been necessary to develop the project away from the sole focus being on myself and to allow the inclusion of the user in the creation of definable units of time.

 

The second stage of the project now begun with the initiating of a device that allowed for user, computer based, interacting to devise and acknowledge individual personal units of time.

 

Passage of time

Time has now be designated to be the indication of the continuous passage of one unit of time, this can be equated to that of a singular second, singular minute, singular hour etc each without the defining ability of degrees.

e.g. an hour has 60 minutes etc, a time unit of any length has no individual separators.

Each unit of time now uniquely illustrates for the user the continuous passing of time, from start straight to finish for each individual personal unit.

 

This unit can be of any length, length in this case has no further meaning apart from the users’ understanding, and will illustrate a period of time that the user deems to be of importance or necessary as a definition for the passage of time.

 

In this sense the clock now becomes in the first place the ‘stopwatch’, in that it measures and records lengths of time through start and stop and henceforth transfers itself into the ‘timer’ device which upon activation begins to illustrate the users individualised continuous reiterating passage of time.

The timing device, through the grounding of UTC (Universal Time Coordinates) seconds, now exhibits the passing of time until it achieves the users’ unit of time, in this sense it can be equated as a user second, whereupon the timer increments the counter from ‘0’ to ‘1’ and onwards, illustrating each unit of time passage.

 

Time is now divorced from set definable quantities related to the revolutions of the planet to that of singular passages of individualised time.

 

Time Storage

The inclusion of the ability to store time units created by the user and to allow for their comparison with other user creates within each unit of time a degree of permanence.

This is a aspect of the project that is extraneous to the processing and development of the concept of time, but I feel allows for a new area to be opened up in the inclusion of comparison between differing units of time.

 

 

Conclusion

It is in my opinion that the project has been developed through a successful procedure of reductionism that has effectively encouraged the outcome to highlight my own subject of interest, the inability to define without the grounding of universal reason.

This has been overcome, to a certain extent, within the project by allowing the user to make definitions on their own personal terms. Thereby the project fulfils my interests in the concept of time and allows another aim and new interest to be developed and possibly fulfilled, user definition.

 

In view to a possible continuation of the time project in view to theory and presentation, it would be my intention to remove the aspect of counting the passage of each reiterated unit of time (as can be seen on the HTML page following the submission of the users unit of time) and introducing the notion of reiteration of the units of time without tallying each reiteration. This would be an interesting removal of the counter, for example:

how long ago since you initiated the repetition of the timed unit?

and a progression (?) towards  a clock that’s sole use is the illustration of the passing of one unit of time.

This could now be incorporated in to a more graphical interface.

 

It can be argued that if the user is allowed and able to make definitions of grounded reasoning, then why can’t I follow the same procedure?

In response I can argued that whereas the user can define their own reasons for basing their unit of time on an event of unknown duration, are these motives truly a defining universal absolutist reason or just an arbitrary justification for the their own inability to find universal legitimation?

Either way, in my opinion, personal justification without grounding on sound universal reasoning is based on fluctuating tastes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

ARNETT, B. 1994. The Nine Planets, A Multimedia Tour of the Solar System. [WWW]

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/nineplanets.html

(4 November 2002)

 

DAVIS, P. Solar System Exploration. [WWW]

http://sse.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

(30 October 2002)

 

EZZELL, C. 2002. Clocking Cultures. Scientific American, A Matter of Time. 287 (3). pp. 56 – 57.

 

LABRADOR, D. 2002. From Instantaneous to Eternal. Scientific American, A Matter of Time. 287 (3). pp. 38 – 39.

 

LAUGESEN, M. et al 1999. New Earth Time. [WWW]

http://newearthtime.net/

(3 November 2002)

 

Lift Off to Space Exploration. 1995. Mission Elapsed Time. [WWW]

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/Academy/Rocket_Sci/clocks/time-met.html

(30 October 2002)

 

Lift Off to Space Exploration. 1995. What is Flight Day?. [WWW]

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/Academy/Rocket_Sci/clocks/time-fd.html

(30 October 2002)

 

National Institute of Standards and Technology. 1995. A Walk Through Time, World Time Scales. [WWW]

http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/world.html

(27 October 2002)

 

Planetary Photojournal. [WWW]

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/

(30 October 2002)

 

WATANABE, S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory. [WWW]

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

(30 October 2002)

 

WRIGHT, K. 2002. Times of Our Lives. Scientific American, A Matter of Time. 287 (3). pp. 40 – 47.

 

WAYT GIBBS, W. 2002. Ultimate Clocks. Scientific American, A Matter of Time. 287 (3). pp. 68 – 75.