I love time. I should be more clear: I love the measurement of time. It’s part astrophysics, part convenience and part social construction.
Considering there are 7 billion who can’t agree on a single language, religion or even football team (let’s just pick one as the best and finish everything, aiight?), it’s amazing that we’ve agreed on this 24/60/60 system created by the Summerians ~5000 year ago.
I was thinking about time a lot while creating Mondriane, a tribute to 20th century modernist Piet Mondrian and the 20th & 21st century modernist watchmakers Mondaine. Part of that piece is the abstraction of arabic numerals as indications of time, replaced with block colours which, in term, represent arabic numerals, which then represent the passing of allocated slots of the day.
At its most absurd, it’s colours representing scribbles representing social constructions representing astrophysical properties.
The whole mess reminded me of the much simpler Internet Time, created by Swatch in the late 90s and capturing my adolescent heart. Instead of time zones, hours and minutes, each day is broken into 1000 “beats”. For conversion purposes, each beat is 1min 26.4s. These beats are universal: if it’s 645 in the UK, it’s also 645 in the US and Japan.
The difference to our existing system is that rather than converting the indicator of time to our local area (e.g. the world wakes up at 7am and goes to bed at 10pm in any location, and it’s the time zone that moves), we simply shift the parameters of the day to match a universal time.
For example, in London, we’ll know our day is generally between 333 (~7am) and 917 (~10pm). In Tokyo, they’ll be getting up at 917 (~7am local time) and getting to bed at 550 (I’ve somewhat given up on the maths here, I’ll write an online converter at some point).
Aside from the practicalities this offers when working between time zones, the interesting part is how it changes how we perceive time itself. It’s no longer something bent to our locale, gently buffered by time zone lines, but a concrete, unending series of beats that we sculpt our existence around.