Not Your Grandfather's Clock

Can there be such a thing as a metaclock? And if so, would it have to tell metatime?

If there is any hope of answering these questions empirically, we might find it in the Grandpa Clock at Generate. It looks something like an old-fashioned grandfather clock, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s the image of an old clock, printed on canvas with modern clockworks behind the image doing the actual work. The Grandpa Clock looks like an antique, but it’s obviously not trying to be a realistic reproduction; it’s both a timepiece and a commentary on timepieces. It’s hard to look at it without thinking about what you’re looking at, which is a pretty awesome thing for a clock — the most basic of appliances — to accomplish. How far we’ve come from the noble sundial.

–Dan Steckenberg