A Strange Clock

My previous work, using Processing to reconfigure a design, made me think of the old idea of monkeys with typewriters: if you get enough monkeys bashing enough typewriters, eventually one of them will write a line of Shakespeare (or any other famous piece of literature). Similarly, you can get a computer to cycle through the colours of pixels to create every image possible within the defined space.
I call this 'An Infinite Number of Monkeys Do Art'.
The problem is that the number of possible combinations of even a small number of pixels is very great. For example, if you have five pixels by five pixels each of which can be either black or white (not even enough to draw a single letter very well) you can create 33,554,432 drawings. If you saw one thousand per second, it would take you ten hours to sit through them all.



The right-hand version looked to me something like a clock. I then adapted it over several revisions & eventually I came up with the following:


Each square beats regularly. The left-hand square beats once every second, the second square beats once every two seconds, then every 10 seconds, minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, hour, 4 hours and 12 hours.


I have got hold of an Arduino, some bright LEDs, resistors and wire, and I intend to build this physically, with the lights mounted inside a box with a translucent paper cover, masked to allow light through only in certain places. I have produced an array of possible designs, now I just need to choose one.

This final clock project cannot simply be rationalised into the 'Design Lab' framework, because it was not produced rationally. I observed an interesting effect, and decided to pursue it; this can't be codified more than 'What would happen if I pursued this?', which is not really a question, more a statement of intent. Design is not always rational, and interesting ideas do not come from undirected work, but rather from noticing a particular effect produced in one project, pursuing it and applying it.
As biologist Louis Pasteur said, "chance favours the prepared mind".