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Take Your Time With the Chromachron

Although this may look like a Pacman watch it’s not. It’s actually the work of Tian Harlan, who combined art and science together back in 1971 to created the Chromachron. It was created with the idea that time is not as inflexible as we have made it, and he wanted to create a method for telling the time without measuring it to a millisecond or to be accurate to an atomic clock. He writes:

“Time is precious in our civilization. Even the smallest units counts. Even though more and more freedom is at our disposal, we weigh every second in a miserly way. We have no generosity for ourselves or for others. We leave no room for planning and reflection. Stress and hectic activity lead us to wrong decisions and senseless urgency.”

Basically, “The Chromachron consists of a rotating disk with a pie-shaped cutout that revolves over different colored zones which represented the hour.” So the various degrees of colors represent the course of the day and this works pretty naturally, since we already experience the relationship between time and color in our everyday lives: when it’s morning it’s usually bright and yellowy, when it’s nighttime it’s dark. And although it might not be a exact time telling device, it is still practical enough to give an approximate time and therefore still useful in a modern world even with our often frantic schedules. It offers a little sense of freedom and argues that time is not as resolute as the hour numerals which we have come to know and adopt without question. Come to think of it, this is the kind of the watch that your boss probably wouldn’t want you to have. This watch is super rare but we found one here for around $690 bucks. What’s your time worth?