sunny with a chance of wind. also your friend is turning twenty-three

TIME/DISTANCE/COMPOSITION/PROPORTION MODELING

A few months ago, I was tasked with a 4-part assignment regarding timelines. We made [1] a timeline written as prose, [2] a timeline in bullet points, [3] a “scroll” timeline (distance between points physically proportionate to time), and [4] a wild card.

For the free interpretation of a “timeline model”, I designed a proposal for a fate-assigning flip-calendar of a sort. It worked like this:

1. There’s a generated “horoscope”/prediction of the day depending on how that exact day one year ago went. It claims a truth based on an incomplete yet relevant history.
2. The front page has the date, a generated image of what happened a year ago, and a claimed “factual” prediction of how the present day will go (based on what happened a year ago). The “cyclical” nature assumes unchanging content, and therefore well-meaning assumptions such as that the weather this month will be similar to that of last month, or that you will be celebrating a certain friend’s birthday again.
3. (the false-ness of these “facts” make you reflect on the things that could ((should??)) have stayed the same, but didn’t. maybe this year you moved from California to Pittsburgh, so the February weather is drastically different. maybe this means you moved away from your friend too, so while the bottle of red may still be nice, it’ll have to be nice alone)
4. The back page allows you to “provide feedback”, actively reflecting on the present, as well as “teaching” the machine about anything that’s changed to keep in mind for the future knowing on some deeper level that this is somewhat of a “pointless” thing to do, because things will continue to change.

This proposal aims to open discussion for designing artifacts representing the relationship between time and space.

1. It is a physical flip-calendar, with magic papers that are yearly re-written on and re-printed… meaning the calendar will always take up the same amount of space. You rip off a piece of paper, feed it back into the machine, and the machine will reuse that same piece of paper for the next year. It will always be the same amount of matter.
2. You watch a year of your life diminish proportionately. And you take part in the exercise of lessening it.
3. The calendar itself will hardly be moved around your home. You make a part of your routine. Something that is always in hindsight, a proportion of your day, and a fraction of your cognitive load.
4. It’s like flipping a coin. You better understand how you currently feel, after you are told how to feel. It forces you to pick at the differences and nuances between the past and present.
5. The printing of the calendar deck is a ceremony. There is something precious about the fact that all the pages are printed out at once, and wait there, to be flipped and known. In a way, saying that the future has already happened, because no matter what, it will.

It’s also interesting to think about how people could use it differently. The technology is simple, so we believe it is stupid, and we know we can manipulate it. We could use it to set reminders or send hopeful messages. Suddenly this machine that algorithmically predicts our futures is no longer autonomous, we are. There’s a charm to how this will change our outlooks regardless of the scale of its impact, because as an object we allow it to take up space in our lives, and as an activity we allow it to take up time.

I ended the proposal’s slide deck with the message: “See ya next year”. It hasn’t been a year yet, but I am currently working on a new project making a time machine (should that be in quotes? is this something we can take seriously?). This time machine works by transforming the smartphone into a tangible user interface (recorder), and the concept is a “memory journal”. A lot of that project is indirectly inspired by this one: exploring the cycle of making and invoking memories. This post was made in reflection, as a reference for that one.