The Timepiece of Thades

The Time Piece of Thades work was an idea that came to me when deciding on a theme for AsyncArt’s 24 hour piece template, a programmed piece of art that autonomously changes on the hour, every hour, forever. (Edit 2024:) Each individual piece that represents each hour has now been minted on Bitcoin as Ordinal inscriptions. 

If you’re not already familiar with AsyncArt, then in short they (were) an art platform in the crypto space that enabled an artist the ability to create programmable pieces of art work via their platform. Essentially this means that one piece of artwork can have many parts in the entirety of its make-up, not just one static piece that remains static forever (we’ve yet to see the Mona Lisa frown). This individual token from 2021 is still in my possession, but as stated above, each piece is now minted eternally on Bitcoin.

12pm Abstract piece from ‘The Timepiece of Thades’ showing the 5 Glyphs used

It may not surprise you that I’ve always been a more visual person rather than a numbers based person (although I’ve always had a fascination with them) and one of the things that always intrigued me were pictograms, probably the best example being Egyptian hieroglyphs, a single image that contained the entire idea/concept, rather than letters placed together to create a word.

I’ve always felt that pictograms & glyphs were more true to our basic nature as human beings than words are; they are direct and instant communication, and appeal to our visual understanding of the world.

The Timepiece of Thades — 11am

Therefore, the crux of the idea for The Timepiece of Thades, was what would an alien clock artefact from an alien civilization that used pictograms or glyphs look like if it were discovered?

It’s probably best to first read this short(ish) backstory that before I get into how the pieces were created…

In 2152 the first new world mission arrived on a planet located within it’s Sun’s habitable zone that had become known to all as ‘Thades’. Virtually the same distance from its own sun as our Earth is to it’s sun, the landing team hoped to discover a new society. Instead, what they found were the archaeological remains of a long dead but technologically advanced civilization.

 However, one of the alien artefacts discovered and still in working order within many of the crumbling structures on the planet, was a cycling projection of 24 images that have come to be known collectively as, ‘The Timepiece of Thades’.

Much conjecture has been made over the true meaning of the symbols, but most experts agree that each image was an individual visual representation of an hour on the planet, with the possibility of a further division of each of these hours by 5, as represented by the 5 glyphs that visually interact with one another. It has been also suggested that the Thadeans further divided their day into six 4 hour periods — as represented by the 6 changing backgrounds.

The Timepiece of Thades remains as the only working piece of technology ever to be found on the planet…

The Styling

If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know I’ve done a lot of work with abstract, particularly geometric abstract pieces. I’m also a minimalist at heart. So both of these forms were what I was focusing on when I began with the initial 12pm piece.

If you also look back at my ongoing Primal Embodiment series on KnownOrigin, you’ll see where some of the The Timepiece of Thades particular look has progressed from.

After creating the 5 glyphs that I felt looked ‘not of this world’ and also suggestive of a deeper meaning, the process of rearranging them 24 times was the next challenge…

The Process

Anything involving some form of minimalist idea often looks simple, but I can assure you, it’s really not if you want to get it right. What I wanted was for the glyphs to affect and visually interact with each other and their background, creating new forms and structures, and even making them unrecognizable as their former selves.

All the glyphs can be clearly noticed in both the 12pm piece and the reverse 12am piece (their backgrounds are different though) but by altering the composition to represent a particular hour of the day, I was able to bring them together in new ways that changed them.

This can be seen clearly in the 7pm piece at the bottom below, compared to the 12pm piece above it…

12pm — The Timepiece of Thades

No glyphs were harmed or changed in the creation of this piece…

The background lines themselves also became an integral and active part of the work, instead of just being part of a passive background.

What took me days was the positioning (really), because putting something just anywhere doesn’t result in something that necessarily looks dynamic nor interesting to the human eye. And whenever I slightly moved one, I’d often have to move them all, because it changed the angle relationships of the glyphs to each other completely.

Imagine someone sweating for several hours over the movement of an object just one pixel width across from where it had been, well that was me.

The Time Concept

Each of the individual abstracts represents an hour of the day or night that would be visually recognizable to the Thadeans from their childhood onwards. Further, their hour would be broken down into five parts of 12 minute blocks — 5 glyphs therefore equals 60 minutes/an hour.

The Timepiece of Thades — 8am

The backgrounds also change every four hours, meaning that to the Thadeans, perhaps 4 hour blocks were an important marking of the passing of time. Why? Well, I’ll leave that to the imagination of the viewer 😉

In Conclusion

I was very happy with the way these pieces turned out, I personally couldn’t stop looking at them and had them displayed on my widescreen TV for hours on end, just looking at them; the colors really pop, too. Essentially, these works are a culmination of many years of abstract work with geometrics and minimalism, but with a unique type of styling.

The Timepiece of Thades — Displayed in The Sphinx Gallery – Voxels Metaverse

Each 2048 x 1152 Timepiece of Thades work is available here on Gamma as Ordinal Inscriptions and on MagicEden

Use the slider below to see all 24 hour pieces together in succession…