Week 2: Reflections on Time

What do I keep track of time for

• Waking up, more so than going to sleep; or breaking up sleep or rest cycles;
• Morning routine: Time to leave the house;
• As it relates to my calendar appointments; is the time line about to land on a certain calendar block?;
• Direct calendar commitments vs Seasons where it’s appropriate do a certain set of tasks;

Related concepts

• Patterns: movement of planets in nature - how we record and predict them;
• TIME Class = astronomy;
• Physical vs digital timekeeping;
• How time relates to biological functions; sunrise & sunset;
• Time moves faster or slower depending on my mental state; → Time vs how we feel the passage of it.
• Cultural understanding of time as it relates to Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions;
• The recognition that not everything can be controlled or rushed.
• Relationship between density of memories and time; how life seems to move faster after a certain age;
• Time as a relationship between events and portions of a routine
• Planetary Gongs;
• Jantar Mantar → expression of power / human structures (Class example);
• Time relative to present me → with upcoming events moving closer at scale; only being aware of what’s directly behind or forward.
• Is time behind me; coming at me
• Time as accomplishments or TODOs
• Information Processing as it relates to time;
• ADHD daily sheet
• Creative highs and lows
• Keeping track of time requires a lot of energy, which could be measured in food intake. A model could be created, to include different brain structures.

Open Questions

Something to find out early on in the semester is what are the aspects of time I wonder about. Often times, I feel very deterministic in my approach, as it days, minutes and seconds rule me and there’s no other way to define my existence spatially. Almost as if there’s been a death of curiosity and solutions don’t go

1. How can I describe time beyond what I can observe or feel. Is this feeling driven by biology or anxiety?
2. Are the ways in which we break up 24 hours materially different to the ways in which we breakup a year?
3. Is Time coming at me or from me? How do I imagine a physical representation of Time? What do i want out of time and what does time want out of me?

Memories against Time

It can sometimes feel like there’s a race happening. Perception of time is severely bounded by how many memories we can name for that period. Fore-looking vs backwards looking.

“Time always moves at the same rate, but the more you pack in within a year the longer it seemingly lasts.” Do I find this to be true?

In this vain of thought, a good experiment could be to map out my memories from all the years I’ve been alive and log how I felt.

Possible inputs include the amount of photos or meaningful moments I can find from those years.

What could explain experiencing time “accelerating” as we age?

1. Proportional Theory (The Ratio Effect) When you’re 10 years old, 1 year is 10% of your life. At 50, 1 year is just 2% of your life. Your mind encodes each new period relative to the whole, so time feels compressed. Is there a noise concept from sound here that could be used as a parallell?
2. Novelty and Memory Density: Childhood and early adulthood are full of firsts: first school, first trip, first job. These events are novel, so the brain allocates more attention and memory storage to them. As routines stabilize in adulthood, fewer “firsts” occur. Memory becomes less dense so when looking back, long stretches blur together, making them feel shorter. “novel experiences stretch subjective time, while routine compresses it.” Am I too young to have experienced this in a meaningful way? What if I have absolutely no model for what being a middle age person feels like?
3. Attention and Processing Speed: Younger brains process information and stimuli more quickly; their internal “clock ticks faster.” With age, neural processing slows down. Because fewer mental “ticks” occur in a given external minute, the subjective experience is that time passed more quickly. This has been supported by experiments on time estimation tasks, where older adults tend to underestimate durations.
4. Emotional Weight and Salience: Events tied to strong emotions (fear, excitement, awe) are encoded more richly, making them feel longer. Childhood is full of emotionally charged moments.

What is one artifact that helps you reflect on time?

Photos. For a time pattern study, I could also place photos along a timeline, all together or placed in their actual date.

Speaking from intuition and lived experience, photos have a role in strengthening memories.

What chronological patterns in time do you feel most directly? Kairological?

Chronological time: measurable, clock-based, linear.

Kairological time: qualitative, event-based, shaped by intensity/meaning.

The more we age, the more we default to chronological routines (work schedules, deadlines, commitments), and fewer kairological events punctuate life, which could give the passage of time a sense of flying away or always escaping us, humans.

As a tentatively productive member of society, I’m guided by chronological time, however my nervous system and brain structure is surely more inclined towards Kairological time.

Time & Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions: the 6-D model of national culture

Source

Asynchronous vs Synchronous programming

Code executes in time in unique ways. An algorithm or set of functions can be very much time bounded.

→ async, await, promises in JS.

ADHD & Time

The below is an ADHD Sheet for Increasing Time Awareness.

Books & References

Personal glossary

Equinox: A day that happens twice a year (around March 21 and September 23) when day and night are almost the same length everywhere on Earth.

Azimuth: The direction of something in the sky (like the sun or stars), measured as an angle around the horizon—like a compass reading.

Entropy: A measure of disorder or randomness. In time terms: things naturally go from organized to more messy unless energy is put in.

Solar Calendar: A way of marking time by the movement of the sun through the year (like months and seasons).

Meal Calendar: A way of marking time by human daily cycles of eating (breakfast, lunch, dinner) instead of the sun.

Future research

• Time bounded coding functions (eg. easings)
• Tribe that believes we’re walking into the past

Tools available to me for prototyping time patterns: idea generation

• p5 sketches
• Time based media on the animation side
• Risoprinted animations
• Screenshots

Associated Readings

• Asimov, Chapter 1
• Brand, Chronos and Kairos

• Asimov, Chapter 4 (packet)
• Brand, Moore’s Law and Singularity

Building a life long timekeeper

Terminal command to get a preload function that includes image names to run from /time-pattern-study

node - <<'JS'
const fs = require('fs'), p = require('path');

const root = 'assets';
const years = Array.from({ length: 2025 - 1999 + 1 }, (_, i) => 1999 + i);
const ok = new Set(['.jpg', '.jpeg', '.png']);

function esc(s){ return s.replace(/\\/g,'\\\\').replace(/"/g,'\\"'); }

let out = [];
out.push('function preload() {');
out.push('  photosPerYear = {');

years.forEach((y, i) => {
  const dir = p.join(root, String(y));
  let arr = [];
  if (fs.existsSync(dir)) {
    arr = fs.readdirSync(dir)
      .filter(n => ok.has(p.extname(n).toLowerCase()))
      .sort()
      .map(n => `"${esc(p.join(dir, n))}"`);
  }
  out.push(`    ${y}: {`);
  out.push(`      age: "${i}",`);
  if (arr.length) out.push(`      images: [${arr.join(', ')}],`);
  out.push('    },');
});

out.push('  };');
out.push('}');
console.log(out.join('\n'));
JS

Steps to dynamically pull file changes:

• Create generateManifest.js to scan assets and create manifest.json
• Run generateManifest.js
• Modify sketch.js to fetch manifest.json and dynamically load photosPerYear
• Remove hardcoded photosPerYear from sketch.js

If I make any changes to the assets directory (adding/removing images or years), I’ll need to re-run node generateManifest.js to update assets/manifest.json.

goals to edit / explanation of the logic

I did not want you to Implement logic to display the correct image based on the slider value and advance images within a year.

I want the displayedAge text to be on top of the image first of all. I also want each age to be displayed for 8 seconds each and keep looping if it's been over 8 seconds.

But all of this is commanded by the slider, meaning that my code logic and structure should allow me to set the displayedAge or year and let those 8 seconds start over.

For example 1999 / age 0 has 1 picture, so that picture will be displayed for the full 8 seconds. But year 2000 and age 2, has 2 pictures so each picture will stay on screen for 4 seconds each.

The logic is that the full loop through each folder / year /age will have the same duration, regardless of how many pictures are inside the folder. As the years keep increasing, the time in which we look at any individual image gets smaller - although this is not a constant that can be set in advance, given that right now for example, 2024 has 26 images and 2025 has 14 images. I want the system to be dynamic enough to support me adding images in and out.

to handle each image - Optional preprocess (for performance)

If you have very large images and notice stutter, you can pre-render each to an offscreen createGraphics(width, height) once per resize and draw that buffer each frame. For many projects, the on-the-fly scale above is already smooth.

Limitations

• Need to source more photos from 2006, 2007 so that it actually makes sense. Some years down the line only have 1 picture which is not compatible with the effect we’re creating.