Digital Art, 2023

This work is a media art that redefines the “clock,” a tool for checking time, as “a medium for experiencing the reality of living on the earth here and now. By translating the current time into the landscape of a city somewhere on earth, where it is now morning, the work attempts to update the modern person’s perception of time.

At first glance, the “Generative Clock” hanging on the wall looks like a landscape picture displayed on a digital photo frame. However, if you look closely, you can see that it is in fact a clock, showing the current time. The picture cleverly depicts a long hand, a short hand, and hour markers divided into 12 equal parts. The picture displayed is generated every minute by an image-generating AI, and depicts a scene of a city somewhere on the earth where it is morning at this very moment.

Unlike conventional clocks, “Generative Clock” gives the viewer a sense of 1) not homogeneously repeated time, but diverse one-time time; 2) not only time consumed as a resource, but time open to future possibilities that are being generated right now; and 3) not a single spatially limited time, but time that flows simultaneously and multilayeredly around the world. This work is intended to shake up the perception of time that has been imprinted on us by the industrial social clock and, like the butterfly effect, will have a positive impact on our daily choices and the way society works.