TIME - FALL 2025 - Jeffrey Feddersen
03 Hardware Timekeeper
Quetsion: How are different art forms situated in time? What about language?A good example might be the discovery of colors on ancient Roman and Greek statues. Chemical and laser scanning uncovered traces of pigments on sculptures 600 years ago, informing us that these marble sculptures aren’t always white. The pure white sculptures were discovered after the colors have eroded due to oxidation. And the tradition was followed by apprentices for many decades, forming our ideas and expecations for the Western ideal and Classical art. In the 14th century, colored sculptures were associated with the Middle Age, and were considered clumsy and superficial. While pure white art were considered “high art” that preserved the core nature of art.
In language, a study that fascinates me is the old Chinese phonology. Words change meanings, spellings, and pronunciations throughout time in different language. What was different about the chinese language is that the writing system does not describe sounds directly, unlike alphabetical languages. As a modern mandarin speaker, we learned to pronunce our language with pinyin, a Romanization system based on the Latin alphabet, which was only invented in the 1950s. So when I first learned about the phonological system of the Qieyun, I was quite amazed. Since Chinese characters are mostly built upon similar components, the Qieyun system link words that are pronunced similarly to indicate the pronunication. The system groups characters that have similar tones, composed them into a rhyme dictionaries. There are extensive studies on this subject, but I always wonder how much of the original pronunication have we preserved since if one tone was passed down differently, an entire group of words would be interpreted differently as well.
Create a tangible object that shows the time. Ascribe a personality to your object – is it shy? Devious? Assertive? Mendacious? Draw on Pcomp 101; hack a clock; or use this as an opportunity to explore a component you might use for your final.
I’m really interested in using light to represent time and I’m looking to use LED in my final project. So for this week I started with the blink without delay example, using previousMillis to check if the interval has passed in order to change the state of the light.
Then I used a 60 neopixel strip to show each second with a white pixel and each minute passed with a red pixel. It was a bit hard for me to translate the code since I’ve always used neopixels with delay. I got to explore more with keeping count of two tasks, the seconds and the minutes. I was a bit out of time this week but what I’m hoping to do is to use an arcylic panel as the face of the clock and each neopixel with light up the numbers as cutouts.