When does a work stop being the representation of our world and become art?
Can we appreciate a work of art without measuring it with our space-time parameters?
In Time Atlas 🌐 the link with our Earth shaped over millennia through the urbanization process is explicit.
Time Atlas 🌐 uses geo-referenced city data intensively and displays it randomly in geographic areas, showing the current time of each city, whether it is currently exposed to the sun, at night or at dusk by changing the reference color palette . There are over 200 cities collected in its monumental internal archive, each with its own latitude and longitude values, UTC and DST time, number of inhabitants.
Each instance shows a square of our land, the cities arrange you in a grid that respects the distances in proportion. The background rotates to the current value of seconds which is the same all over the world. It is potentially composed of 8 geometric elements that can be present with different probabilities.
City clocks can be of 4 different shapes; the length of the pendulum that rotates with the time of the seconds is composed of 5 elements that combine randomly but the length of the pendulum corresponds to the number of inhabitants of that city.
The elements of the composition can be turned off and on again thanks to these keys:
[c] toggle cities
[w] toggle watches
[b] toggle background
Finally, there is the Written Circles variation. It takes up a past work of mine with the same title and in my initial idea it had to be the only aspect of Time Atlas 🌐. The salient feature of the Written Circles display is that it does not have a rotating background but, for each city, the crown of minutes is proportional to the number of inhabitants, therefore interesting moiré effects are obtained in superimposition. 

Time Atlas 🌐

Darwin’s Orchid wasn’t discovered by Darwin, but he correctly hypothesized that its long blooms, up to a foot and a half tall, coevolved with a moth with a very long tongue—just long enough to extract its nectar. This flower embodies the great variety of and fascination with the orchid family. Orchids come in all shapes, sizes, colors, textures and scents—perhaps this is why they’ve entranced cultures dating back well over five millennia, becoming symbols of virility, beauty, peace and prosperity in the process. Named “Cattleya” after my first rare orchid, this work is my Ode to Orchids—a mystical flower that brings me endless delight.

Read more about my [inspiration & process↗](https://bensnell.medium.com/7c943673d54f)

*Notes:*
*— This project is intended to be run on modern devices, operating systems and browsers. Older ones may yield undesired or undefined behaviors.*
*— This script includes a modified version of [glsl-fast-gaussian-blur](https://github.com/Jam3/glsl-fast-gaussian-blur), licensed under the MIT License (MIT) Copyright (c) 2015 Jam3.*

Cattleya

InC is many things.

A tribute to the musical piece "In C" composed by Terry Riley in 1964. A multi-year Tanztheater project, directed by established choreographer Barbara Altissimo. A random walk through the canvas whose outcome is a series of short design fragments, composed for an indefinite number of performers/collectors, much like the original composition by Terry Riley. All in all, InC is my little contribution to beauty.

25% of the proceeds will be donated to local non-profit organizations dedicated to spreading beauty and helping talented and needy people.

Primordial presents forms as diverse as those found in the natural world. The emergent system powering Primordial is capable of generating this diversity but is hard to control. After the initial generation there is a curation step; forms must meet certain criteria or the algorithm replaces them.

The forms produced by Primordial are presented in a triptych, as comparing multiple outputs is fundamental to understanding a generative algorithm. Primordial attempts to generate triptychs where the individual forms are related, and the results can be surprisingly harmonious or discordant.

Once the triptych is finalized, click on one of the forms to redraw a previous image. Press s to save the entire triptych, or 1-3 to save an individual image.

Primordial

Leaning into a retro 70s groove, the perfect art for your space-pad. The input is simple, just two tiles, but how they're rotated and placed, that's the magic.

Art Blocks Presents

Time Atlas 🌐 #313

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