Part of the fascination is obvious: you can hardly believe what you’re seeing, you wonder how long it must have taken to create, or indeed how it was created. Also, although there’s no ‘story’, there is a kind of internal rhythm to it, and a playfulness in the way the clips ‘talk’ to each other. For instance, we see a character look up, presumably towards a wall clock, and then we see a wall clock, but it’s a clock in a different scene. The way it plays with our own sense of time is fascinating. We’re all familiar with being at a movie and losing track of time, or being at a bad movie, where time seems to slow down. Here, in virtue of watching The Clock, we are ‘watching the clock’ – we’re aware of what time it is in the non-movie world. And yet, amazingly, it’s so compelling that even still, we lose track of time.

What I’ve been puzzling over, though, is what it is about The Clock that feels so digital, because there is something very much of our time about it.

I started thinking about this because some time ago, I interviewed the poetry critic and academic, Marjorie Perloff for my show, Spark. She argues that in poetry at least, we can talk about something she calls “unoriginal genius”, meaning that we can claim as art the skillful re-using of other source material in poetry. In the full, unedited interview (not online) she raised The Clock in the context of this kind of repurposing and remixing, and specifically in the context of a digital, internet-enabled era. Her observation about The Clock is that this is how we experience time now, in this same sort of collage way. For example, she noted, we move through time zones, we click on news stories that take place on the other side of the world, many hours ahead of us. We access information pulled from multiple points in time. Fascinating observations.

There’s clearly a more pedestrian, or practical sense in which it’s a digital work. It’s hard to imagine how you would make it in an analog era. I assume that at least Marclay had access to online databases of scripts to search for mentions of clocks/time. Certainly editing it digitally would have been less crazy-making a task than in an earlier era. But I can’t help feeling there’s something uncanny about The Clock that feels very much a piece with who we are now. It feels like something outside of nature, as though the very order of the natural world (the unfolding of linear time) is being played with. It’s like he’s created an alternate, virtual reality, running alongside our everyday reality. It’s a feeling that you don’t get from simply watching a film which takes you out of your everyday experience of the world to another place. This parallel reality feels, as I say, uncanny. Charming, but also a bit creepy. I wonder if there isn’t something in this that at least feels like what it means to be digital.

Technology Review points to an intriguing example of this immersive power in action with Spent, a game designed to show players what it’s like to live in poverty. Personally, I’ve experienced the emotional power of this sort of immersion in a game called Loneliness. It’s a simple, minimalist game that takes you through what it feels like to be socially isolated – shunned. It actually brought tears to my eyes. Its emotional power is especially intriguing because it’s so simple…abstract, even. It suggests that we don’t need sophisticated graphics or ‘realistic’ games to tap into their immersive potential. These games have tremendous power to teach empathy.

Games are powerful tools. Gamification does leave me with some questions, though. Where is the line between making the most out of the human response to games on one hand, and manipulating people on the other? If we are in some sense hard wired to respond to games, does this mean that using games to ‘get’ people to eat their veggies, say, amounts to a sort of denial of individual choice? Traditionally, art is the way that we develop and refine our sense of empathy. Literature and theatre can put us in someone else’s shoes. Is there something about the subtlety of other arts that we miss in the abstracted world of games? Finally, I know that whenever we talk about gamification to achieve goals like education on Spark, I hear from people who are disturbed by the idea, primarily in a moral sense. The objection is generally that life isn’t always fun, and kids ought to learn to accomplish goals for reasons other than the rewards of successful game play. So, what if we are able to make virtually any task game-like? After all, game designer, Jane McGonigal has even made recovering from a head injury into a game. Is there something else that we are sacrificing in gamification, and what is that something?

What I love about Philip’s work is the way he’s breaking down the hard line between the built and the natural environment, creating spaces that are permeable, changeable, and, well, responsive.  As we humans start to generate more data about where we are, and how we are using the space around us (for example, with our GPS-enabled phones, we ‘check in’ at locations) will we be able to provide buildings with more information about us, and how we want to use the space?  You can imagine a future in which architecture, the environment, and us, are all in a loop of information and response to that information.

Anyhoo, if you’re curious about Beesley’s thoughts, my interview with him on Spark is here

Foxnews.com says that:

“According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO’s ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.”

The speculation is that it was the work of university students, which is the digital equivalent of drunkenly stealing a street sign for the dorm room.

In addition to reminding me to watch L.A. Story and Land of the Dead again, it made me think about what happens when digital information is more widely dispersed among our real, physical environment. Will it take the ‘true-for-now’ tendency of the web out into the wild?

Speaking of which, what’s the deal with all the skull imagery these days? Tattoo-style skulls on clothing (like my shoes), Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull. A sign of our Thanatos-driven times, I guess.