APD Week 2

Theme

Play and Time

Context

I was inspired by Arthur Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete” where it was a kinetic machine that uses gear to count time. It shows that time is made from a chain of reactions. My perspective of the quote was that hours were affected by minutes, minutes were affected by seconds and so on. 

 Pomodoro was a time management technique that was created to break down work into intervals. The LED lights act as a loop showing time in an hour loop, where it would reset the counts every hour. However, to make it a bit more abstract, I designed it as a way that rather than having the led for every interval, I show it through where it was counted in an even number, and there would be two lights if the intervals were more than 10. The play part was for the user to guess/figure out the time intervals rather than telling them straight what it was.

Response

In response to this week's theme, I was thinking of experimenting with the relationship of time and loop. I made an Arduino timer which acts as a physical Pomodoro.I started with an Arduino Uno, where I then connected it to a breadboard which consisted of different LEDs and I categorised different colours LED to different intervals, (green for seconds, red for minutes and blue for the hour interval.) I then wrote a simple code that was based from a tutorial that I found on youtube and amended it as how I would like it to be for my project.

I had the plan to enclose all of this into a 3D printed frame that would act as a projection light on the wall. I have built the 3D model for it, however, I wasn't able to as lockdown happened and I still wasn't able to pick up the finished printed model from RMIT Makerspace.

Method

I am using an Arduino Uno with a breadboard and several LEDs to create a looping code.

 Reflection

This was an idea which has changed several times throughout the design process. It has then shortened the production period for the plan. I learnt to be more decisive so that I would have more time on producing and preparing the final product. As the idea was created last minute, I wasn't able to make use of the time to use the 3D printers before the lockdown started.

As I was researching more about the usage of loops, I found that loops appear quite a lot in our life, memes, social media and also our habits. According to propublica.org, loops are actually a powerful illusion that can create art into something more unique. In this project, I planned on using loops to create the illusion of movement time. However, after reading the article, I was able to gain a new perspective to my project. It could also act as a hypnosis for the audience that the time actually is ticking away. 

Reference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique#cite_note-Cirillo-1

https://www.arthurganson.com/concrete-1

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/on-repeat-how-to-use-loops-to-explain-anything