Exhibition in the Microlab in Strijp-S 21 until 30 October 2016
Good times
Are we measuring time all wrong? How come, if we are so good at measuring time, scientists need to adjust the atomic clock? And don’t get me started on what on earth leap years are all about. It would appear that time keepers have been more interested in imposing their system on us than that they’re actually in listening to the world in which we live. The world is organic and time pieces are by their very nature not.
The measurement of time was invented to organise the workforce. Which is probably why the first clocks had dials with hands on them. People were told not to waste time and the boss pointed at the hands. Those hands were moving…
Today computers depend on time and without it they couldn’t work. So even though the milliseconds are so short that for our human perception they barely even exist. We just know they are there, ticking away.
Hours in a day
It has been suggested that people don’t all run at the same speed. Some of us are alleged to have closer to a 23-hour body clock and others a 25-hour system. In the same way that some people are slightly taller and others shorter than the rest.
During some hours of the day we get more done than others. Wouldn’t it be so much more charitable to have clocks that follow our feeling of the passage of time instead of telling how we are running out of it all the time? The hour glass was used when we needed to measure a set amount of time. It didn’t dictate the entire day. Just measured what we needed when we needed it. And then it stopped. It would be nice to pause time, from time to time. Many people have wished for it even to be turned back.
But it isn’t all that bad – you can make time to do positive things. That’s never a waste of time. In fact, that might be the best time of all, a good time.