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.
§ 03 · the strands
six ways into the same subject
read in any order
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
- 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.