Poem Clock

“Time, memories, identities... how are they all connected?”

With time, memories are created. With time, memories are taken away. Who are we without our memories? Does losing memories also means identities loss?

It takes a lifetime of lived experience for a poet to write a poem, to express one's recollections and identity. For an AI, a poem will only take a few seconds. Is this because the AI has been fed all the memories of these people?

Does that make their memories alive again and should that be the case while memories are deeply personal?

This project examines the connections of time, memories, and identities. Over time, poems are revealed and disappear as if the words are memories. However, not all poems were written by real poets, but by an AI that has been fed their biographies. Will the audience be able to tell which are real, and which are AI-generated?

—Interact with Poem Clock here.

Process

Reasoning

Time is both a theme and a fear that I have been fascinated with for long. I don’t know its accurate definition, explanation, or the theory that stands behind it. Without time, I am nothing, yet I can never fully understand what it is. Time gave everything life, and will take life away from everything. At last, what is the shape of time?

Experiment 1
Speech to Text Tool

I needed a tool that can detect what the user is saying, since I want the website to be totally about sounds. It had be precise enough to detect the list of words I wanted like to include.

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After experimenting with a few different tools, I ended up choosing P5.js' speech recognition tool.

Experiment 2
Hosting a Website

The project is an educational one, hence I wanted people other than myself to be able to access and use it. This is a new thing to someone who had only hosted locally like myself.

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I tried Codesandbox at first, then switched to Github for easier usage.

Experiment 3
Styling elements

In order to make the project more engaging, I’d need to add styling elements to the website. Before this project, I had been practicing both JS and CSS, but never tried to combine them.

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This turned out to be much more straightforward than I thought!

Research

I am surely not the only person who has asked the question of what time is. This is a question that has remained unanswered since eternity. We tried to measure time in the most accurate way we could think of. Perhaps this way, we came closer to understanding what it is.

During my research, I looked at many creations that humankind has made. To measure time, we went through a great range of creative inventions: sundials, water clocks, incense clocks, hour glasses, pendalum clocks, etc. Did we go through all that effort to make time objective? But if we feel time, isn’t it subjective? Or is it both? Or is it everything?

Challenge 1
Designing the Interface

I had a hard time trying to program the website without having a detailed version of what I wanted for the look of the interface.

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Took a step back and make a prototype before actually coding anything.

Challenge 2
Speech Recognition Tool

The tool was fairly accurate in a quiet environment, but doesn't work really well in a public setting where there's a lot of background noise.

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Reprogram the website so it recognizes designated nouns in a sequence instead of separated words.

Challenge 3
Gathering Output Material

It was tough for me to translate all the onomatopoeias into different languages, since such words have very little documentation on the net.

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Opened up the opportunity to make this a collaborative project! I ended up working with 7 translators to gather the onomatopoeias.

Prototype

Thoughts on the both subjective and objective nature of time led me to represent time in the form of both a timer, and poems.

On one hand, it’s exact and fixed, on the other hand, it is the expression of lived experience and memories.

#poem_clock

Poem Clock

“Time, memories, identities... how are they all connected?”

With time, memories are created. With time, memories are taken away. Who are we without our memories? Does losing memories also means identities loss?
It takes a lifetime of lived experience for a poet to write a poem, to express one's recollections and identity. For an AI, a poem will only take a few seconds. Is this because the AI has been fed all the memories of these people?