Time Manipulation

Mori, Keiko

While working on the location project, I became interested in the concept, "manipulation of time." There are some ways you can manipulate time such as stretching, reducing, and pausing. How would these kinds of time-manipulation change space or your experience? In order to pursue this concept, I started experimenting and outputting my ideas of user-interactive applications as flash movies.

When I started thinking about the term "location," the two words arose in my mind immediately: They were "when" and "where." With this thought, I came up with my first idea, "location = trapping time and space," and a diagram which was a visualization of time and space. The basic idea was treating a 3-D space box (x, y, and z) as a vehicle which would travel on its time-line. In this way, the user would be able to travel the time-line freely by moving the 3-D box along its time-line and keep track of the spatial location at the same time. The 3-D box and its time-line are assigned to each element in space, so if there were four elements in a certain space, then there would be five sets of the 3-D box and its time-line including the one for the space. The difference in size of the boxes tells us which exists in which and does nothing to do with the actual size of the elements.

I started experimenting how our action of manipulating time would change space and our experience. In this project, I tried to make everything simple so that I could really focus on the structure of time manipulation. I have worked with four ideas so far, and in all of these, I assigned a separate time-line to each element in space just like how I was thinking in my original idea of the 3-D box. Though they still can be improved, the ideas of "balls" and "iamnowhere" are successful. With "balls," the user is able to see visual traces of his/her manipulation of time. In the experimentation with "iamnowhere," the action of manipulating time totally changes the user's experience with the letters while also changing the meaning of them.