What is it about time?

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by our relationship to time. Now squarely in the middle of life with young children and aging parents, I’ve become acutely aware of the passage of time in different ways. Living in a rural place since 2020 also has me observing more closely the rhythms and cycles of the natural world. I've spent the last few years educating myself about how different species and cultures experience of time and memory.

The name Powers of Time was inspired by the seminal video produced by the Eames office in 1977 called Powers of Ten that demonstrated the relative size of things. Inspired by this project, my vision is to produce an immersive experience that enables people to appreciate the relative speeds of existence. Imagine the stretched out moments of an adult mayfly that lives an entire life in a single day, the time-lapsed view from a redwood tree that lives for 2,000 years, or the evolution of a mountain range over millions of years.

So far, the project has largely been in the research phase and has included research into animal and plant experience as well as explorations of emerging AR/VR technologies that could be useful for the project. I’ve also prototyped two specific components of the project in the form of physical and illustrated life clocks exploring the full life of organisms living at different time scales, and an animated life portrait over the life of my maternal grandmother.

Learnings: Time & Memory

Below is a summary of observations and learnings about time. While there have been many articles and books, the two most impactful to me have been The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli and Scale by Geoffrey West.

• Bigger things (ecosystems, planets, whales, redwoods, cities) have more gravity and pass through more time during their lives. (Bigger you are, the longer you live).
• Smaller things (birds, insects, molecules, protons, etc) have less gravitational pull and pass through relatively less time during their lives. (Smaller things live shorter).
• But … since time is a measurement of change, the actual quantity of change experienced by each of these differently sized organisms in each of their lifetimes is similar (best represented by the fact that all mammals irrespective of their size and life have about the same 1.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime).
• One reason why time appears to slow down during intense moments like an accident or childbirth is likely because the quantity of change being experienced in those moments is so extremely large.
• Similarly, the reason why the years start to pass by more quickly for so many later in life is perhaps because our lives have become more routinized, repetitive and boring. During these periods we are experiencing less quantity of change.
• Relatedly, the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 may have felt longer because the quantity of change we were all experiencing was so much higher.

…

• So then if we consider a mosquito who only lives for 7 days, that mosquito is actually experiencing a full life's worth of change in that week, and so are probably experiencing the world at a dramatically different pace than we experience it as humans.
• From our human speed, mosquitos are just buzzing annoyances that barely live. And to them, we humans probably appear like some kind of slow moving giant making strange low sounds and barely moving (except for the hand swat that comes to end their life like a once-in-a-generation storm).
• Similarly, if we apply these ideas to a larger being or entity like a redwood grove or a red rock canyon, not much changes over decades or even centuries. To the rock, humans are even less noticed than mosquitos are to us. The change the red rock experiences in their lifetime is that of 200 year floods, glaciers, the moving of the tectonic plates.
• So these larger entities are experiencing life as if it were a timelapse spanning thousands and millions of years, incomprehensible to us buzzing annoying irrelevant humans.

Life Clocks: Lifespan as Cycles

The first life clock above explored my own internal reflections from different stages of life as it passes. Each hour of the clock represents about 8 years, so 3pm is around 17-24 years old, 6pm is around 41-48 years old, etc.

But of course time seems to pass more quickly as we move through, so an argument could be made to expand early life and condense later life. Since I'm only at about 6pm in the middle of life, and my parents are in their 70s, I could use additional feedback from more 80+ year olds to incorporate into future versions.

The clock ended up generating some interesting discussion, and made me think that the clock as cycle could be applied to different kinds of lives and perspectives as well.

So I started compiling a spreadsheet of lifespans and sizes of various organisms. The goal is to find good examples of different scales that could be brought to life creatively.

The idea of the Life Portrait is a kind of animated profile pic that shows the full life of a person through many life stages. The animated life portraits are particularly valuable to understand the full picture of people in later life stages or who have since passed.

The first prototype below is the Life Portrait of my maternal grandmother Frances Hermann Lanvatter. It seems like new AI tools could very easily make this into a product that could create something compelling for family members where you had a handful of good pretty good photographs of their face at different life stages.