Designing Time

Here is a link from the AIGA website about a group of student designers who redesigned a calendar for the Wixárika people in central Mexico.

From the site, "As many Wixáritari (plural of Wixárika) understand western practices and values, they increasingly migrate to urban centers in the states of Jalisco and Nayarit to study and work, often finding their cultural traditions and practices devalued and misunderstood. This is particularly evident in issues that relate to time. In contrast to the fixed western calendar, Wixáritari's beliefs and practices are aligned with nature's continuous cycle and careful observation of natural signs. As each culture's conception of time is based on different values, tensions develop (Maria Rogal, 2006)."

Thanks to Dori Tunstall for the link.


Also, on another note, here's a revisit to an older poster I did last year: Photos of Photos. I think it's worth looking at again because they're old photos and there's a lot to study here about the nostalgia aspect of time, and the idea of subjective memory when thinking of time.

sloooooooooooowwwww

apatheticfaucet
retardedice
creepingbuglegs
dreamysnail
loiteringobscenities
phlegmaticgrass
quietmistakes
stagnantlavalamp
idlepolaroids
tardyboil
bigyawnsmalltalk
hohumhummer
tamebubblebath
lingeringfuneral
simplealgebra
chokedivorce
relaxingdeath
winddownencyclopedia
dullmemories

A few weeks ago I was out having a cigarette with my friend from work who just so happens to be a comic book artist. i was telling him about the "time" thesis idea and he began telling me about how he deals with time in terms of comic panels, and how different sizes/placement of panels can denote different speeds or passage of time. this seems like such an obvious way to think about time, but i had never really applied to graphic design before.

It wasn't until I came across this image by artist Christa Donner (I've been a big fan of the artist Christa Donner for a few years now. I think I first read about her work in Venus Magazine), that the idea of panels as a way of showing time passing made real sense to me. Isn't it gorgeous? It really reminds me of the span of a lifetime in these really short little visual bits:


Another artist that is amazing and is worth checking out is Deb Sokolow. She does these great treasure hunt type maps that allow you try travel through and make connections and find secrets. Last year she had an exhibit at the MCA featuring a map that involved pirate ships and Mayor Daley and all kinds of kooky stuff. This stuff has been in the back of my mind as an inspiration for thesis stuff, but I'm not quite sure what the exact connection is yet. I like the idea of being able to travel around a page, through space and time, etc.

Speaking of movement and time not being able to exist without it, here are some short films that have been inspiring me lately:

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Duchamp is one of the big reasons I got interested in time in the first place. I took a class last year on the history of animation and we watched a few clips featuring his rotoscopes. A big chunk of my final paper for the class was about how Duchamp sought to create movement and a sense of time through his films and paintings, especially in his most famous painting, Nude Descending a Staircase. This was very early Cubist experimentation which paints a woman from different points of view and different points in time/space as she descends a staircase.



Here's another (sort of crappy quality) video montage of the work of Eadward Muybridge, who was the inventor of the zoopraxiscope, a precursor to modern day cinema. He was a photographer who compiled his image to make the first frame by frame films.


Finally, here's part 2 of a gorgeous film made by Norman McLaren. This is exactly what I'm trying to achieve with layers of image and information, and being able to "concretize" each second of time in a simple movement. This is my favorite video so far. Enjoy

I found this image when I was looking through Flickr and I did a keyword search of the word "time" just to see what would come up. I like this image because it contains different levels of information. It contains the past and the present. Right now I'm just trying to build up a sort of visual library of things that hit me on a very intuitive level (which is my favorite way to work) about ideas of time. This one really inspires me because it has so much to do with movement and I've come to realize that you can't really talk about time without movement. Time does not exist without space, or in a vacuum. It's subject to outside influences and factors just like everything else in the world.

After looking at this photo, I started thinking about layers of information and layers of images when trying to visualize time. Ideally, you're putting two, three or more layer of information down on the page when you try and visualize time--the past, present and future--or different versions of the future--or a stream of consciousness recollection of the past, something like that. It's never a flat, cut and dry image. This picture of the rear view window got me thinking about different ways I could achieve this idea. Mirrors are perfect for it I think.

The past: picture of a person walking down a long road, street, etc. holding a mirror at their back so that it reflects the path they have just traveled.

The present: picture of a person looking directly into a mirror

The future: picture of a person holding a mirror in front of them so that it reflects the path that they are about to travel

Or maybe it's something like this picture:

and less of a defined path and more of a circular one (sorry, I found this image on Flickr as well and cannot find who it is attributed to. I did not take either of these, just to clarify)

So, some of you may know this (and others may not) but I've decided to do my MFA design thesis on the idea of objective and subjective time. It's still very much a nebulous mess right now but what I'm leaning towards is trying to figure out ways to visualize time. This idea was very much inspired by Edward Tufte and especially The Quantitative Display of Visual Information but to go beyond that data-visualizing stuff (which is fascinating but can get a little dry) I wanted to introduce the idea of subjective notions of time, or the way time feels, in an attempt to visualize a more realistic or more human idea of the feeling of time, rather than the numbers of time.

I've done some research and really at this point, I'm just trying to organize everything I've found. The sources run the gamut from anthropological essays, novels, images, websites, and case studies. I think I'm going to use this blog as a way to organize my sources and discuss any thoughts I have and ask for feedback. So if anyone is interested in this type of discussion, let me know. It would really help me out a lot. Thanks!

This is one of the first web sites I've come across in my research. It's a website called Icastic where designers asked people to sketch on a piece of paper their own visualizations of time. I wish I had thought of this! Here are some of my favorites: