secondsinsight.

vol.01 · 2026

a durational studio

mac · iphone

secondsinsight.

a durational design for time

§ 01 · the position

a tool built for coordination is being used to describe a life.

Clock time is a coordination technology, and in the form we use it a recent one. It is good at making people arrive together. It is poor at describing how a day is lived, and it is now applied to almost everything, including the parts of life it cannot measure. That mismatch is one source of the strain people report about time. The arrangement is a set of decisions, most of them taken in the last two hundred years, and decisions can be revisited.

This site sets out the history, the science and the cultural evidence, then describes what revising those decisions would look like. Everything asserted is cited. Every citation was checked against the record rather than recalled.

what is not being claimed

Appointments should stay. Trains, surgery, broadcasts and elections need a shared count, and the shared count works. Clocks are not a conspiracy and measurement is not a mistake. The claim is narrower. A tool built for coordination has become the default description of a life, and that expansion was a run of choices rather than a discovery about the world. Other arrangements exist now, in other places, and have existed here before.

§ 02 · the chart

three and a half thousand years of cutting a day into parts

shadow to caesium

Every instrument in the row below divides the same stretch of time. What changes is how fine the division goes, and the finer it goes the more of ordinary life it is used to govern. The detail sits on measuring.

FIG · THE SAME STRETCH OF TIME, CUT AS FINELY AS EACH INSTRUMENT ALLOWEDshadow clockegypt, c.1500 bcethe seasonal hour10 partsoutflow water clockegypt and greecethe seasonal hour, at night12 partsverge and folioteurope, c.1300the equal hour15 partspendulum clock1656the second23 partsmarine chronometer1760sa fraction of a second33 partsquartz oscillator1927the millisecond47 partscaesium standard1955the nanosecond and below71 parts
Fig. 02 · the timeline of timekeeping The same width is divided seven times over. A shadow clock in Egypt around 1500 BCE splits it into ten coarse parts, all of them seasonal hours that stretch in summer and shrink in winter. The verge-and-foliot clocks of about 1300 hold an equal hour. The pendulum of 1656 holds a second. A caesium standard, from 1955, holds the nanosecond and below. Tile size here is a rank, not a measured scale.

§ 03 · the strands

six ways into the same subject

read in any order

  • measuring

    strand 01

    Shadow and water clocks, unequal hours, the escapement, the minute hand arriving centuries late, railway standardisation, time zones, and the second redefined by caesium.

  • science

    strand 02

    Newton's absolute time against Einstein's relative time: proper time, the relativity of simultaneity, gravitational time dilation. Then the thermodynamic arrow, and the open argument about whether the future already exists.

  • culture

    strand 03

    Monochronic and polychronic time, and the criticism of that framework. What counts as late in Estonia, Morocco and the United States. How being on time was taught rather than inherited. What language does to the direction of time.

  • art

    strand 04

    Six works whose material is duration: Reich's phasing, Basinski's decaying tape, On Kawara's date paintings, Hsieh's year at a time clock, Marclay's twenty-four-hour montage, and two clocks by Gonzalez-Torres that drift apart.

  • the body

    strand 05

    Interval timing, attention and arousal, timing in ADHD, and the body's own drift when every clock is taken away. Twelve verified references.

  • the alternative

    strand 06

    The constructive half. What navigating time differently means in practice, stated concretely, with the appointments left in place.

Sources for every strand are listed on each page and gathered on reading.

§ 04 · products

instruments for the other way of navigating

one released · six not

The Mac menu-bar panel: a large pale coin on a soft grey ground, ringed with tick marks, about a third of them coloured in. A horizontal teal line crosses the coin, labelled 70 per cent beside a small speaker icon — that line is the volume. In the middle sits a dark split button, a teal pause on the left half and a magenta stop on the right, with 17:23 of 25:00 beneath it and 30 per cent below that. Under the coin: chips from plus 5 to plus 60, a progress bar, a row of minute dots, and a bar for the whole day reading 17 min and ends 12:43 pm, with a magnified inset of one hour marking your 17 min, done by 5:00 am.
the timer · mac menu-bar panel — seventeen minutes from the end. Shot from the current build, older palette and all.

released today

the timer, for Mac and iPhone

A stretch of time drawn in light and sound while it passes, so you can stop checking the clock and still know where you are. Nineteen ways to show a duration; keep the two or three that work on you and switch the rest off. Nine of them are audible, so it works with the screen ignored or dark.

Download for Mac free See how it works
  • Macdirect download, available now
  • iPhonein app store review
  • Sourcereadable, polyform noncommercial

The Mac download is unsigned, so right-click the app and choose Open the first time, past the macOS warning. A notarised build is coming.

The rest

coming soon · nothing here takes a payment, an email address or a pre-order

an incense clock

Duration by scent, moving through three registers, after the incense seals described in the reading.

coming soon

a light clock

A room whose light warms across ninety minutes, so the interval is read off the walls.

coming soon

a tape and loop piece

One composition playing slower on every pass, so the medium keeps the count.

coming soon

a tessera wall clock

The mosaic as an object on a wall: one tile filling for each unit, at whatever size the wall allows.

coming soon

a browser extension

The same reading of a duration, in the tab you are looking at.

coming soon

glance surfaces

A running interval on the lock screen and the watch face, with nothing to open.

coming soon

What lands next inside the timer is listed on next. The source sits under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence.