“How do you live in the moment when the moment changes every second?” That’s the question that was nagging Scott Thrift, a filmmaker and inventor at the Brooklyn-based creative agency m ss ng p eces. (Yes, that’s actually how they spell it.) In order to make sure our lives don’t pass us by, Thrift felt that a new way of keeping track of time was necessary–one that could let us see individual moments as more than the sum of their parts. So he created “The Present,” a clock that doesn’t dice up time into discrete numerical bits, but instead visualizes it as a unified, colorful spectrum mirroring the seasons of the year. In fact, “The Present”‘s clock face takes an entire year to make one revolution. Here’s a beautiful short film Thrift made to explain the details:
“The Present”‘s prismatic color scheme was carefully designed to “tell the story of the seasons using subtle gradients of pure color to mark the Equinoxes & Solstices throughout the years.” At the 12 o’clock position is a blade of pure white, signifying the winter solstice, which slowly morphs to green (the spring equinox), to golden yellow (the summer solstice at the 6 o’clock position), to a hearty red (the autumn equinox). You can’t perceive the passing of the seasons on a minute-to-minute basis, and looking at “The Present” works the same way: It’s all about encouraging us to experience time as a natural, contiguous slipstream, instead of something to stress out about having too little (or too much) of in arbitrary chunks.
So should you replace your wall clock with “The Present” in hopes of turning your home or office into a 21st century Walden? Probably not–there is still something to be said for being on time for appointments. But “The Present” has already received nearly four times as much funding via Kickstarter as Thrift initially asked for, so apparently there are quite a few people out there who want to think he’s onto something worthwhile.
