Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Mandala Time



I was so inspired by Jürg Lehni and Otto, his beautiful robot at the Long Now Foundation, that as soon as I left our first introduction, I raced home and dove into Paper.js - his vector based library for illustration and animation with the HTML5 canvas element.


Paper JS feeds vector art to Otto the robot, so I used it (the library - not the robot) to build an application I call Mandala Time.


Each Mandala Clock is unique to a single day. Each shape in the clock represents a single minute in the day. There are 60 minute-shapes in each ring and 24 rings in each Mandala Clock, representing all the hours of a single day. No clock will repeat for billions of years.


I imagine Otto drawing one shape per minute throughout the day. A never-repeating art-piece in the spirit of the Long Now Foundation.