Material Flux Timepiece
In exploring the fluctuations in materials after the effects of water, fire, traffic, or time, I have come to admire the slow effacing of wood, marble, metal, candles, etc. This flux, or creep, is evident in the roads we drive on, the squeaky chairs we sit on, the sidewalk cracks we walk on, shiny plastic of our keyboard (that started out matte). In a city as old as New York, a cursory stroll through one of the boroughs yields countless examples of creep. One of my favorites to notice is the slow sloping of marble stairs. Imagine how much foot traffic has to rub these steps in order for it to just wear away, or someone is wearing some uncomfortable shoes.
This slow process is made most comical by the Pitch Clock, a slow and otherworldly lethargic material, bitumen. It takes about a decade for one drop to fall, and, since 1927, has only let 8 of them free. Do read more about it, utterly fascinating.
I teamed up with Yin Ho and Andrea Wolf to represent this phenomenon. We were immediately drawn to actualizing creep through the dripping of a colored liquid on soft wood. It seemed that for our time frame, one week, we could maximize our results with a gentle tweak of our resources. Building our contraption was a fairly straightforward task: a wooden box and shield, an IV drip, food color, and some balsa wood.
Yin proposed we use a light orange as the color, mixing in reds and yellows to achieve our color, which looked like morning urine. I wanted something dark and visible like a deep blue or blue green. I figured we would be able to locate striated, grained color better by having a darker hue. As you can see, the orange turned out magnificent.
After a few hours:
After four days:
As more liquid dropped, the colors began to separate in unexpected ways. The result was a beautiful illustration of time passage.
