I am a clockmaker

Iamaclockm

I’m not sure how many clocks you have to build before you can officially call yourself a clockmaker, but I’ve made yet another one, and I enjoyed making it again, so from now on I’ll call myself a clockmaker.

This last clock is based on an idea Erik van Blokland had been toying with for quite a while — some of the pictures he sent me date from 2001. So at least since then he wanted to make this clock that shows the time by showing a picture with a clock on it. He told me about it on Mastodon and I offered to build it. And here it is, the Pix Clock.

And indeed, as you saw, the time on that clock is probably not correct, more often than not it lags behind. There are still quite a few pictures missing (at least a thousand, haha). So your help would be appreciated. I’m sure you have some pictures of clocks. You can try to add them in this git repository. And if you don’t know what the previous sentence means, you can also try to send them to me via a service like wetransfer. Send them to lovenonsense at vasilis dot nl.

I’ve looked at Erik’s images and there are a few clear qualities in them: there are no recognisable people, a clock can be seen, the time can be read, it is interesting to look at, and they are all unique, which means that series of the same clock, taken every minute are, well, probably less interesting. The result should be diverse and if possible surprising.

Boring but important section

There’s one thing I dislike about this clock, and that’s the fact that I have to deal with things like licences. There’s this thing called copyright, and then there are licences to use copyrighted material, and my mind just doesn’t work that way. But I think that, with the help of Erik, I came up with a sensible set of licences, that you have to agree with if you want to add pictures to this project. Most importantly: your images must be yours, and you must agree to publish them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. And that is by far the most boring paragraph I’ve ever written on this site. I am really sorry about that.

Blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah’blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah’blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah: blah blah blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Blah Blah Blah-Blah 4.0 Blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah’blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah.

This legalese reminds me of a website I made a very, very long time ago, probably in 2001 or in 2002. It was for a large, rather shitty company, and they had this legal disclaimer on their site. I added a hidden feature to this disclaimer: if you printed that page, all words were replaced by the word ‘blah’. I’m sure nobody ever noticed. So I’ve added the same feature this page.