Conscious Time is an immersive, code-driven installation that transforms biological and perceptual data into a living, kaleidoscopic expression of time.
Rooted in neuroscience and visual poetry, the piece explores how time guides our physical and subconscious lives — and how, through reflection and creative computation, we might begin to see it.
Built using Processing, AI image generation, and OpenGL shaders, the work blends abstract data with sensory experience to ask: How do we perceive time — and how does time perceive us?
Humans are uniquely able to reflect on their own being — to observe not just the world, but the systems inside themselves.
But what if we visualized the subconscious rhythms that shape us — like circadian cycles, time perception, and biological clocks?
Conscious Time began as a question:
Can we visualize our personal experience of time — not as numbers, but as an emotional, perceptual landscape?
The piece gathers personal and perceptual data through a hypothetical input experience:
- Sleep-wake data (bedtime, wake time, hours slept)
- Subjective estimation of 1 and 5 seconds
- Participant’s visual metaphor for time (line, circle, chaos, etc.)
These data points were transformed into:
- AI-generated visuals via GPT prompts
- Color systems reflecting time-related metrics
- Structure and detail mapped to time estimation error
- Primary shape driven by self-selected time metaphor
Each image was uploaded, hosted, and fed into a Processing sketch with OpenGL shaders, transforming the flat visual into a shifting kaleidoscopic form — endlessly rotating around a perceptual axis.
At the heart of the experience is the Universal Time Perception Clock — a conceptual alternative to the standard UTC.
The UPC doesn’t measure time — it reflects how we feel it.
Each participant’s data-driven visual becomes a moment in this endless, shared visualization — a clock not of hours, but of human difference.
Originally, the greatest challenge was finding the right form.
I explored literal clocks, sensory interaction, and biometrics. But none matched the fluid, unstable quality of lived time.
The kaleidoscope emerged as both tool and metaphor — invented by accident, built to reveal symmetry through chaos, and always changing.
Through the project’s construction, another layer surfaced:
If a machine can generate a reflection of time based on input… are we looking at time, or at ourselves through time?
