- Published: Friday, July 01 2016 17:37
Time-Now
From an early childhood, my interest was partly focused on the Mayan culture - known for its art, monumental architecture, advanced mathematics and a wide range of astronomical knowledge - but it hadn't been for a couple of years until I was able to learn more, in-depth information about them. I was limited by a lack or unwise use of time. Following years of planning, I created a physical day-to-day reminder, combining several, personally important aspects about time. Most of all, I wished to reflect on its unstoppable nature.
That is how the idea came along to create a clock.
The Mayans had a vastly different concept about the passing of time. They considered it as a divine gift and they seemed to understand the connection between our solar system and the open star cluster of Pleiades - forming a gigantic spiral in the Milky Way. If we think of the 100 million year-old Alcyone 440 million light years away, the central star and the Pleiades as a cluster of only some 250 million years - it puts our minute lives into a largely different perspective.
Over the years, I kept looking into the topic, trying to find some connections, and I started to realize that there have been only very few people who boldly tried to ask serious questions about where the road was taking us. No ancient philosophers as Homer, records of civilizations or modern science has been able to support us with answers concerning where we came from and where we are going. No organized, historical religions, not even the wish-to-be-scientific-sounding new age movements have any underlying, actual scientific basis.
Will the times come to an end?
The worldwide panic at the end of 2012 was caused by a mixture of bad interpretations of legends and the over-mystified use of the Mayan calendar.
One of the cycles of Mayan calendar - according to the Gregorian one - started on August 11, 3114 BC and is characterized by different terms. These can be a lot of help to archaeologists and historians as the Mayans have recorded several significant dates on monuments, using adaptable, combinable and highly artistic signage. Therefore, one of my favorite subjects is the tzolkin, also known as the 'holy count', which is a 260 day-long period divided up to 13 months. One of the signs symbolized by a mirror, called Etz´nab, is similar to the outline of the Pyramid of the Sun, located in Teotihuacan, North East of Mexico City.
The more information I gathered, the more confident I became about the fact that my thirst for knowledge would only increase, but nothing could stop the passing of time. When I look at this mirror-clock, it always reminds me to spend my time with important things. To me, quenching said thirst and to create are some of the most important things in life.
The creation of the clock took about 130 working hours and meticulous attention. My work is usually spent under ultraviolet light, therefore it is also handy to have the clock be seen without any other light source. Moreover, the 26,000 photon-filled stars are also night-time reminders of the shortness of human lifetime.
It is only up to us whether we let time just slip away or harness it and use it wisely.
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