Time as a prison

by Yifu Liu

Taking this design as the final part of the project, I wanted to use all I have learned from last 3 weeks. It is really inspired by the “Collide”, using the support as a metaphor to express time or space travel.

From the massive sketches, I have been through a deep thinking about the relationship between time and different cultures. In general, I want to express the conflict between the vulnerability of time and the eternity of time. Time is so fragile that goes really quick and you can never stay in the moment forever. On the other hand, time is like a prison where everyone is born inside the frame of time and nobody can escape. Once I made my point clear to myself, I started to think how to use support or other material to express these 2 qualities of time. Is it wire? Is it transparent Acrylic? In the end, I decided to use a floating watch and a special support structure to produce a metaphor of prison.

In Cura, I tried all the support structure and decided to use Lines, which could be a fairly risky decision. Not all the surface is getting the proper support. As a result, there are a lot of glitches happened while printing, like cirrus dropping down both inside and outside, which I think it’s beautiful. However, I have to clean the inside, because there is no relationship between these glitches with the context. Surprisingly, the holding element was gone during the printing, so I have to print a separate piece and use super glue to glue it.

Finally, I spray painted it in Chrome, because it was the ideal colour that I can find in the ECA shop. The colour makes the piece look like a piece of metal, which represents the long-lasting and strong. In contrast, the shape looked thin and breakable. The contrast matches the conflict that I mentioned.It could become a working design if I put more effort in it later on, and I would like it to finish a single rotation in years, because the technology can help us track the time precisely, no point making another functional watch. I think people feel something when they notice the clock actually travelled some distance after years.