Custom-made watch - trading time
RCA Architecture Master’s student Simon Moxey hired me to make a watch for his show. The catch was, this would be no ordinary watch. It was to tell the time in microseconds, display stock market indexes, indicate increase and decrease in stock value and show international time zones. I advised him on hardware and then programmed it, and he created the casing.
The watch was an artefact from a fictional future in which the stock exchange is moved from London to Slough. Simon was proposing a scenario whereby the financial sector existed apart from the cultural and historical burden of the City of London. How would Slough adapt if the town’s main cultural entity was the stock exchange?
He commissioned the watch as one answer to this question. The stock exchange would bring with it a new notion of time. With digital trading and algorithmic arbitration, the speed at which the market moves has in the past ten to fifteen years accelerated far beyond the limits of human perception. This watch appears to display rapid, microsecond changes in the market, faster than the eye can comfortably see.
Technical design for narrative
It was an interesting brief because the design had to be comprehensible without being too user friendly. The object is not really a product, but a prop - the main concern was narrative impact. I made the market indices scroll on the bottom of the screen for this reason; it would resemble the Bloomberg ticker, and emphasise the illegible speed at which the index values refreshed. The primitive font further emphasised the narrative of human folly and technocracy.This emphasis on narrative also made the brief admittedly rather forgiving. I used a 4D uOLED screen, which refreshes in milliseconds rather than microseconds. This meant that the microsecond values had to be distorted artificially to appear as though they were refreshing too quickly for the screen to render them. The fictional nature of the brief also meant that the market indices did not have to present a genuine real-time analytics feed, but was simply made of randomised values within a believable range.
Programming in 4dGL
Programming for the 4D uOLED screen entailed learning their proprietary language, which is based on C and BASIC. While I'm totally enamoured by the fact that their screens have their own on-board microprocessors, 4DGL is not a very elegant language. It seems to be very good at a limited range of tasks and horribly obtrusive for anything else. For example, it doesn't support floats. This makes sense, because the language was designed for drawing pixels, but this simple omission makes it impossible to calculate and display values on the same board. Nevertheless, I was able to improvise a solution without damaging the form factor of the device by adding another microprocessor.I help artists and designers to bring their work to life using digital technologies. If you want to bring electronics into your art or design work, let’s have a chat.