Abstract
We live in a world of MP3 sound sampling at kilohertz (KHz), radio waves at megahertz (MHz) and PCs running at gigahertz (GHz). SlowTime asks you refocus on the world in millihertz, microhertz and nanohertz. What are the slow rhythms and long times of your life? Look around your house, feel the slow creep of furniture and fade of paintwork over the frenzied comings and goings of daily life. On your body, touch and count the objects that come into your pockets and bags then flow on. Count your life in seconds and yet feel the worth of every one. LifeChimes is a web instantiation of this; helping you to reflect on the things you keep with you day-to-day in pockets, wallet, or handbag.
Keywords: Interactive art, slow movement, personal reflection
Slowtime
We live in a world of CD sampling at kilohertz (KHz), radio waves at megahertz (MHz) and PCs running at gigahertz (GHz). In the blink of an eye the computer clock counts to a billion and 97.6 million waves of Radio 1 pass through you body; don't they tickle so? Counter to this world of speed and inconceivably fast motion, we are looking at slow time including the imperceptibly slow.
We move our hands and eyes and walk in timescales of seconds indeed foot bridge designers try to avoid resonance at 1Hz, the average walking pace ... unfortunately the Millennium Thames Bridge designer forgot that the side to side rocking as we walk happens every other pace 1/2 Hz. When we sit down to do something or eat a meal, we may be stationary for 20 minutes, or an hour - a few thousand seconds - a millihertz phenomena. And the life of man is three score years and ten, a mere two and a third billion seconds; like most buildings our time on earth is a nanohertz phenomena. Pushing back beyond our lifetimes, the oldest buildings stretch a mere few hundred times longer and human kind itself back 60 thousand years - taking us into the picohertz, whilst dinosaurs and younger rock strata ripple in the femtohertz. Finally the earth itself and the very universe pass in a few billions of years - a blip upon the cosmic silence in the attohertz band.
LifeChimes
LifeChimes is a web-based exhibit which offers an opportunity to reflect on the objects we hold with us, those of value and those without, those that stay in our possession for a few moments or days, and those that we keep forever. In a spreadsheet on the web you can create your own LifeChimes using the contents of your pockets / handbag / office drawers or whatever and wherever you keep things with you or close to you.
LifeChimes uses non-linear time compression to re-present back to you these possessions and just-passing-though things in sound and in light.
In fact the core of the work is not the audio-visual presentation of the possessions, but the act of entering them in the spreadsheet. It is at this point people reflect on the past locked in these small insignificant items:
"I tend to change conkers each year as they remind me of autumn and the walk in which I collected them."
Or even radically act as they reflect::
"I started to throw things out as I filled in the spreadsheet. I found things that had been there years but when I gave them a personal value they had none."
- For more information on SlowTime and LifeChimes and also links to other sites, books etc. on the Slow Movement, see the SlowTime web pages:
- http://www.hcibook.com/alan/projects/slow-time/
Acknowledgements
SlowTime and LifeChimes have been funded as part of LeonardoNet (www.leonardonet.org).
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LifeChimes screenshot