just in teractive : notes for an I-Ching Interactive Clock

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2 April, 2008

  notes for an I-Ching Interactive Clock

How to divide time? And how to make it interactive?

For Eric Loyer's Interactive Media class, I have an assignment to develop an "Interactive Clock" in the next two-three weeks. I was thinking of alternative ways to slice up time, and what other kinds of symbols and meaning you could place on top of the movement of moments.

The I Ching seems perfect for that - an aged system of divination according to the juxtaposition of symbols, meaning is created as disparate forces are aligned.

How to apply the I Ching to a clock?

An hour is 3600 seconds. If you apply the 8 trigrams, that's 450 moments. You could have a clock face like so:

    o
  o   o
 o     o
  o   o
    o

with each of the eight trigrams running around the edges. But then how would you manage synchronicity? You could ask the user to click on an interface of the same eight trigrams, on a moment by moment basis creating a hexagram.

But I would rather decrease choice and increase serendipity with this project.

So I could use the individual lines. There are two types of lines in the I Ching (I'm not going to use changing lines in round one for this project). I wondered if someone else had done any work in this area: Google: I Ching Clock. I found something called I Ching Connexion, with an I Ching Clock in it. It's a class Mac app that doesn't run 100% smoothly in my OS X system here, but from what I can see, two tri-grams are hanging on either side of a yin-yang, and as the seconds pass, change builds, eventually forcing the evolution of the hexagrams. You can click on the clockface at any time to see what the current reading is.

Each hexagram reading is built from six lines. Maybe the user clicks six times, each second being a different hexagram displayed onscreen? But that's not a clock primarily, and the assignment is to build a clock.

I turned to my R.L. Wing's I Ching Workbook. Perhaps I should use the 64 hexagrams as the moments in time, and the user simply stops the time-stream to receive a reading. But I would like to include some kind of combinatorial effect, not simply watching the marching hexagrams go by, but incorporating some measure of moment-to-moment unknowing.

Time is hierarchical: days contain hours, hours contain minutes, minutes contain seconds.

The I-Ching is somewhat hierarchical, but branching. Before I settled on the notion of using the I Ching to make a clock, I thought about offering binary choices to the user that would affect the unfolding of time. CHICKEN OR ICE? LAPTOP OR LEAF? But a clock runs whether the user touches it or not, save for winding or battery replacement. Here's a quick and dirty idea for the assignment: create a clock that runs for five minutes, and then quits until the user clicks on a small winding key on the clockface.

Perhaps I could nail down this assignment by thinking about the number of clicks. One click and you interrupt time and pick a moment? I think I like that, better than click, click click, unless I want to build a sort of I Ching Slot Machine.

But I don't want the whole hexagram to be onscreen with a one-click interaction. I want it to be assembled from different regions of the interface, so it's not immediately clear what is coming. Trouble is, without arrangement, there are only these two things:

-----
-- --

Floating in space, without passion, without judgement. But maybe that's okay - mystery solved by a click. What are these quivering lines onscreen? Ahh, they are a reading for a moment in time.

I sketched a mock-up interface, and I realized it's going to be hard to provide the bars without making an implicit hexagram before the user clicks. So I'm thinking I might include pictures or a video in a portion of the screen, something to draw the user's eye away and prompt their clicks.

Since the bottom part of a hexagram represents human affairs, and the top represents cosmic affairs, I'm going to order their time changing. In keeping with the numerical spirit of the system, the lines will change at these intervals:

----- - 64
----- - 32
----- - 16
----- - 8
----- - 4
----- - 2

I'm not sure what units of time I would like to use yet; I want to make it change fast-ish, but not too frenetic.

Perhaps I could use images that are inspired by the eight elements of the trigrams, and then as the user clicks on them, the "human affairs" end of the hexagram is determined; on top of that is placed a time-determined "heavenly affairs" trigram. Hmmm.

Working up my mock-up, using Google Image Search for "I Ching" (this is, of course, still the best I Ching Online Guide).

I Ching Clock Mock Up:

click to avoid cut off

The wheel in the upper left corner revolves, so each two seconds there's a new trigram on top. In the right window, an image pops up each second. In this case, the image represents fire - clicking on that image brings the trigram behind the image, with the trigram from the top of the wheel on the left, and forms the hexagram in the lower left corner, which is explained in the text window in the right.

Can I build this in Flash? Whoosh.

Posted by justin at October 4, 2004 2:45 PM

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