Watchmaker's descendant builds a working clock from trash in Glashütte
Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
Invited to an artist residency by NOMOS in Glashütte, Niklas Roy followed his great-great-grandfather's watchmaking footsteps—but used only scavenged materials. The result: a pendulum clock that runs for 30 minutes, strikes a glass bottle gong on the hour, and even triggers a randomizer before winding down. Along the way, he invented GTC, a new time scale blending GMT and UTC.
Art critics might suggest that the prominent use of paperclips in the mechanism could be read as a clear reference to Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer, but this is no AI doomsday clock, and their extensive use in this project was for purely practical reasons.
- brightbeige
For those who like long form journalism and want to know more about watch collecting and Glasshütte: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/20/confessions-of...
- slfnflctd
As art projects go, this one has a lot of charm for me. Plenty of room for allegories (although apparently not the paperclips, haha). Timekeeping in general is a subject with depth across many domains-- particularly in software as we all know. So many different ways to do the 'same thing'.
- r0r0
This is a functional 30-minute pendulum clock entirely from discarded materials—cardboard, zip ties, tape, a yardstick, and a paperclip escapement, built in the German Eldorado of precision watchmaking: Glashütte.
It also acts as a reference clock for GTC, a new satirical universal time standard.