Numbers are everywhere – if you care to see them.
Exquisite Clock, an interactive art installation by Joao Wilbert/Fabrica, has been invited to participate in this year’s edition of the Graphic Design Festival Breda (GDFB), set to take place from 8th to 30th May.
Exquisite Clock is a clock made of numbers taken from everyday life – seen, captured and uploaded by people from all over the world on an ever-growing platform. Built around an online database, the clock is available as a web 2.0 site, an iPhone application and a series of site-specific installations.
In the Exquisite Clock featured at GDFB, the clock is projected onto a huge screen, which visitors can contribute to and interact with, since the Clock is a relational piece of art where the boundaries between artist and public, producer and consumer merge.
Users are invited to collect pictures of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them (objects, vegetables, surfaces, landscapes, cables, etc.) and participate in the creation of the artwork: photos taken with the iPhone application or uploaded on the website are instantly displayed at GDFB and around the globe.
GDFB is just one stop in the Clock’s international journey through exhibitions and events, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum’s “Decode: Digital Design Sensations” in London, which featured a major survey of the best contemporary digital art and design from around the world.
Also this platform was designed for a real time response, to immediately display the numbers at the very moment they were uploaded from all over the world: thus, for example, the picture of a 3 taken anywhere on the planet was visualized in the blink of an eye as one of the seconds of the Clock in the London installation, and the same will be true in Breda.
Exquisite Clock is a clock made of numbers taken from everday life – seen, captured and uploaded by people from all over the world. The project connects time, play and visual aesthetics. It’s about creativity, collaboration and exchange.
Exquisite Clock is based on the idea that time is everywhere and that people can share their vision of time. Through the website www.exquisiteclock.org, users are invited to collect and upload images of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them – objects, surfaces, landscapes, cables… anything that has a resemblance to a number.
The exquisite clock has an online database of numbers – an exquisite database – at its core. This supplies the website and interconnected physical platforms. The online database works like a feeder that provides data to different instances of clocks in the form of the website, and installations, mobile applications, designed products and urban screens.
All uploaded numbers are tagged according to a category selected by their creator, and are added to the growing database. People viewing the clock can then choose to view all types of numbers, or can make a selection to view only numbers from a specific category – a clock made of vegetables, or clouds, or garments etc.
The exquisite clock can exist as different physical installation variations, each using the numbers provided by the database. These physical installations might be LCD monitors hanging in a gallery space, tiny cellphone screens or large scale public monitors. These variations can also be reconfigured as interactive installations where users in the space also collaborate to feed images back into the database – the principle is that all instances of the exquisite clock access the single exquisite database forming a conversant network made by different perceptions of time.
Exquisite Clock is a multichannel network that seeds installations, screensavers and mobile applications around the world. All numbers uploaded to the database are available to be distributed among any device connected to the Interenet. The application was designed so its content can be seamlessly connected and shared in real time to different platform and devices.So far the network has seeded up to 5 gallery installations in Europe and US and recently started feeding Iphones application also in real time. The idea is to turn the clock into an open ended application where its database is available in different exchange formats in which any device can be connected to.
Exquisite Clock is a relational artwork where the boundaries between artist and author, producer and consumer are blurred. The Exquisite Clock invites you to participate in a global conversation about form, the limits of recognition and the poetics of the image, transforming a discussion of visual aesthetics into an exquisite game.
Fabrica is Benetton’s communication research centre, created in 1994 from Benetton’s cultural heritage. With the completion of the vast architectural complex which houses it, just outside Treviso, restored and expanded by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Fabrica is currently enjoying a period of flourishing activity, positioning itself as a multicultural, international entity.
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