Calendars are on a big scale, what clocks are simply on a smaller scale. They became so important that they determine our whole lives. When we get up, when it is time to go shopping, when it is time to go to the office, opening hours, when the cinema starts, when it ends, when our favorite radio show starts.
In times of internet, time has become an even more dreadful factor as we are way more connected with people across the globe and we have to think, what time it is, before we try to reach them in real time.
We can tell so exactly what time it is in Tokyo, when it is in Bratislava 18:00, because there are timezones that tell us so. Time zones have been introduced first by train companies to harmonize train arriving and departing times. By the times it became a political and economical issue, how time zones were introduced and what time they really show (Nepal for example is 15 Minutes ahead of India because of political differences and Hugo Chavez introduced the Venezuela standard time, which is 30 Minutes ahead of the surrounding countries. All of China is covered by only one time zone – the time zone of Beijing).
Building wind clocks discharges us from the liability to follow these (politically or economically set) boundaries of time. But what would that mean for us on a level of every day life? When does our favorite radio show actually run?
COL-ME wants to start an experiment of TIK RADIO out of time and out of tune.
The concept of windclocks includes the fact, that we have to deal with times, when there is no wind, which we could be defined as minus time (as it is time missing and therefore in mathematical terms minus) or it equals zero. As these times will be unavoidably there, we can find a way to deal with it.
For the radioproject this is important for the question on how to cope with these times. One way could be, to use free radio databases and their content as part of minus time. Archives are things, that already happened, that already were produced. We could fill this minus or zero time with the content of these archives (according to a time-line of course that is connected to wind clocks), so that we are just dealing with splinters of radio shows and or other streams of conventional radio stations.
So when the wind blows it is time, and we take over life streams (in case we are not producing ourselves) and when it stops, we take over archived programs, as we are dealing with minus or zero time.
On the macrolevel we deal with calendar systems as part of the time inventing machine. Calendars are on a big scale, what clocks are on a microscopic scale – a time measuring tool. Calendars are generally more complex, as the measurements are not only given by physical parameters, but also by cultural (religious holidays, counting cycles, week cycles). This religious background was one of the determining factors to not let the calendar reform in the 1950s work, which would have introduced the 'World Calendar' over the current system.
Calendars are though algorithmic beings – and therefore can be calculated pretty well, aside from complex calculations like Easter, which is in accord with the lunar calendar.
In my research i fell over the book “Calendrical Calculations”, which is dealing with an overview of world calendars in use, their algorithms and cultural impacts. It comes with an own LISP implementation for a calendar calculation tool.
Find the calendar here: http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/third-edition/ (go on calendar applet)
Within the frame of TIK this topic can fit right into the question of implementing the wind clocks, their times and measurements into a system, on which we can base the new time. I would like to discuss new measurements of time from the microscopic to the macroscopic.
http://emr.cs.iit.edu/home/reingold/calendar-book/index.shtml
Due to the fact of TIK being an unreliable, unforeseeable measurement,