_
from Cities and Memories, Act I
Date
2023/7 - 2023/11
Media
[Puzzle] wood board, gesso, watercolor, ILFORD smooth pearl photo paper, digital paintings (12), NFC stickers (12), HTML/CSS coded webpages (12), double-sided tape
[Toys] wood board, gesso, watercolor, clear fishing wire
[Handmade box] parchment paper, storage box, double-sided tape
Dimension
[Puzzle] 5.16’’ x 10.16’’ x 0.38’’
[Flower clock] 3.25’’ x 3.25’’ x 0.63’’
[Clock flower] 2.88’’ x 2.88’’ x 1.38’’
[Handmade box] 6.5’’ x 11.38’’ x 2’’
Category
Personal Project, Speculative Design, Installation, Digital Painting, Creative Writing, Website Building, Graphic Design, Visual Narrative, Autobiography
_ is a collection of mementos from a yet-to-be-discovered city. It owns a different view of time - an uncertain one, linear or non-linear, as the narrative agilely jumps around using the signs of space and time as anchor points. To us, it can be a city of confusion, but with a deeper look, it resembles the mental landscape of how we navigate through and reflect upon our memories.
Besides, it is also an unconventional narrative of my life story, a toy with a hidden rule to disturb the unquestioned belief about the single correct way of time representation and life story narration.
… Sometimes, I could not understand the languages, but I could always understand the signs, as if, all the while, I was traveling in the same city, surrounded by the farmlands, forests, and seas…
The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
— Cities and Memories, Invisible Cities?
— Invisible Cities, Cities & Signs 2
Click the hours below to read the memory fragments.
Documentation
The incompatible ordering logic behind the two puzzle sides challenges the unquestioned time view we hold for granted.
The toys are stored in a hand-made box.
“Clock Flower” is a toy resembling a typical clock but with multiple hands. So the time it shows is uncertain.
Each puzzle piece has two sides: a clock face and a miniature painting.
An NFC tag will be activated when holding the phone close to a puzzle piece.
People are free to pick up, study, and rearrange the pieces based on their interpretations, trying to make sense of the piece.
The clock side (default front side) displays the twelve hours. The image shows the pieces being put in the “correct“ way.
“Flower Clock” is a toy based on the passion fruit flower with only one stigma and one anther. But it does not represent any quantified time for it has neither upside nor numbers.
The popup link will bring people to a webpage with a “memory fragment“ related to the hour.
The image shows the pieces being arranged in this temporal order: from birth to childhood, to teenage years, to current adulthood.
The painting side (default back side) displays the twelve hour-related story fragments. The image shows the pieces being arranged in the numeral order indicated both on the clock face side and the hidden contents in the paintings.
Different arrangement orders could be made for different understandings.
Background
A Childhood Story
The image of a clock-reading puzzle has always been buried deep in my memory. It has 12 pieces, indicating the 12 hours of the clock. The kids need to match the clock pieces to the correct time numbers. I was scolded by my mom once for messing up the pairings. Confused and frightened, I was crying, trying hard to memorize the rules of navigating in this world…
A Collective Pattern
People get lost in the city not because of the lack of signs, but because of the signs themselves.
It is an age of convergent evolution. Road signs, traffic lights, buildings, cars, and pedestrians assimilate through standardization - a shared vision picturing a lone city extending to the most distant edge of a modern living experience.
Time is also constructed through signs. Sometimes we live on like morning glories climbing the wire of hours and dates; other times, we get lost in the endless cycle of one day.
Occasionally, one can get startled by the uncanny familiarity at a foreign crossroad. The signs around it coincide with a street near their childhood home. It is impossible since the street and home have been long gone - or is it? The memories and emotions it recalls just briefly transport them back to another sign-bounded time.
Concept
Toys as the earliest educational instrument
The idea of a game contains the silent consensus of the existence of rules. Thus games and toys of early childhood can be seen as the very first effort of society to inform us of its rules and beliefs - the common sense we haven't been logical enough to question: the prototype of life, the way of spending time, the words, the taboos...
Since toys can subtly shape our worldview, we can create “anti-” toys that subtly challenge it - in this project, the canonical view of time and chronological order.
A clock can look like a flower, and a flower can look like a clock. Behind the clock-reading puzzle, is a more connected, freer-to-interpret city of a person.
Navigate through space and time
The project _ is a collection of mementos from a yet-to-be-discovered city. It owns a different view of time - an uncertain one, linear or non-linear, as the narrative agilely jumps around using the signs of space and time as anchor points. To us, it can be a city of confusion, but with a deeper look, it resembles the mental landscape of how we navigate through and reflect upon our memories.
Besides, it is also an unconventional narrative of my life story, a toy with a hidden rule to disturb the unquestioned belief about the single correct way of time representation and life story narration.
One city, one day
The illusion of life in a single, abstract city is the product of urbanization and globalization. There is no doubt the natural, social, and economic landscape among cities can vary greatly, but for an individual, especially those who have lived in drastically different ones, the repetition of physical signs serves as the dots to connect those living experiences into one continuous narration.
The idea of a single, abstract day is echoed in Life in a Day, a YouTube documentary series (which I only realized its similarity in theme after the completion of my project). The signs of time (i.e. the numbers) are accepted as an arbitrary guide, serving as an order to fill in the diverse living moments of people across the world. Considering the existence of time zones, it is bizarre to realize the delusive nature of a shared time, which is rather, a global-scale agreement on the communication of time.
Process
The toys
All the wood pieces for the toys are designed with Illustrator and then sent to a laser cut machine.
“Memory fragments” through NFC and webpage integration
For each of the 12 “memory fragments,“ there is a digital miniature painting and an experimental text coded as an individual webpage.
The box
A handmade cardboard box with a customized size was later crafted to fit the toy pieces.
The pieces are then glued and coated with a thin layer of gesso.
The two flower/clock pieces are watercolored and tied together with clear fishing wires.
The link of each webpage is stored in an NFC sticker placed on a puzzle piece, covered double-sided by the clock face and digital painting.
