Electronic Device

Design Director: Power Tian

Time is a kind of power. The empire of ancient China and the medieval church showed their control of time by monopolizing the authority of astronomy and calendar for their people. “The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modem industrial age.” Mumford once said.  The invention of the clock makes our time arrangement and management become more accurate.  After the industrial age, despite it seems like the ruling classes still hold the power to arrange time for others, they are no longer control time as they are also regulated by time.  No one continue to have a monopoly on time, but the time system we have designed for ourselves eventually dominates us all.

“Routine” presents an image that a twig which driven by a wood machinery moves slowly to draw the numbers of the current time. At the beginning of its writing, the time it going to write are corresponds to the current time; but when it finishes writing, the time that it has wrote is already passed away. Every time it finishes writing, it drives the wooden rake to erase what it has just wrote. After one round, it continues to start writing a new time.  Write and erase, such cyclic exercise make twig’s effort goes to a waste or even lost it before it starts. The twig is no longer related to a natural rhythm, it only chained by the boring and endless mechanical behavior. “Routine” is an image of people’s daily life under the tyranny of time.