Form Generator

Reflection

The object I choose is a clock. My initial idea of choosing clock is because the scale or the shape of an object could vary randomly, but time, as a parameter, would keep constant. I was fascinated by the contradictory between random and constant.

Firstly, I drew two clocks separately in its minimum and maximum scale on the grid sheet in Sketch. There are two categories of parameter involved, one is the clock plate and the other is the clock hands. The clock plate could vary in scale of the plate size and border width, while hands could vary in length and thickness within the plate. I initially intended to keep the clock plate in proportion but only change the color and length of hands in random. While I was typing code in P5.js, I feel like the proportional shape is too intentional which reduced its taste of randomness. Then the min and max diameter were used as the range to generate random numbers. Thus, the clock becomes a so called random shape because it seems random for the viewers but actually I intentionally manipulated these parameters to set up the randomness, except the constant time.

As the development went, every new clock generated after I clicked mouse illustrated its own independence. It seems like a isolated system with different parameters. Thus, I decided to also convert the constant time into random speed. Then every clock becomes a unique system of its own kind.

When I stare at the rotation of the hands, the constant move gives me a strong sense of how time flows, and made me think about the concept about time. There are two kinds of time, physical time and phycological time. Physical time refers to the unit we use to measure time, such as week, hour, second etc., while phycological time refers to the subjective feel about time. We are all living in the world with standard physical time, but at the same time we are composed with countless phycological time period throughout our lifetime.