For 2026, I’ve divided the single “Ideas” page into six categories. This is a guide to what you’ll find in each.
Very quickly:
- “Science” looks at what time might fundamentally be, and how we came to think about it.
- “Experience” is our subjective internal experience of time
- “Culture” is the outward human manifestations of the experience of time
- “Craft” looks at all the ingenious things we’ve invented to “keep time”. This is specifically relevant to ITP
- “Media” is time in writing, film, music and code.
- “Scale” tackles the unique challenge of deep time.
Science
Many works on Time begin with this quote from St. Augustine, in his Confessions (~397AD):
“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.”
St. Augustine
St. Augustine captures a central mystery of time: that it feels familiar, but it is very hard to say what it is, specifically. The more we try to look at it, the harder it is to see.
St. Augustine was writing 16 centuries ago. The situation today is little different, not just in our feelings, but at the forefront of science, where there is no agreement that time is real. Newton proclaimed by fiat “true, mathematical time“, an abstract quantity with explanative power in his laws of motion. Einstein dislodged absolute time, finding the speed of light the true constant above time and space, and said “time is a stubbornly persistent illusion“.
Today physicists trying to understand the nature of reality (by reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics) debate if time is a fundamental part of the universe, a non-fundamental real but emergent property (like heat), or an illusion. Of this, physicist Sean Carroll says “The question of whether time is fundamental or emergent is, on the other hand, crucially important. I have no idea what the answer is (and neither does anybody else).“
I find this thrilling – how can something that feels as personal and intensely real as time so closely guard the secrets of its existence? In seeking to uncover the foundations of reality, science gives us our first lens into the nature of time.
Science, and specifically astronomy and cosmology, further help us understand time. The vast scale of the universe means the light reaching us from distant stars is ancient light. To look out into the universe is to look into the past.
This is figuratively true as well. People throughout history have looked at the fixed stars in the sky, the wandering planets, the moon with its phases, and the sun as it moves through the day and seasons. They told stories about what they saw, and in many cases, built monuments like Stonehenge and artifacts like sundials to help them track and understand the patterns they found. I think that’s our heritage at ITP – curiosity about the world reflected through technology.
In ancient times…
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people… the DruidsNo one knows who they were or what they were doing
Spinal Tap
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock… Of Stonehenge
Experience
However time comes to be, whatever it is, or even *if* it is, we have an experience of time. (Or seem to? I’m losing track…) We can look inward, at our internal feeling of time: the endless summers of childhood, time flying by as we age, time stretching, slowing, gliding. We can reflect on how language shapes the way we think about time. We can consider what time looks like in our minds eye. These are the “Experience” aspects of time.
The artifice of clockwork creates its own kind of theater, its own demanding, coercive, and very stressful experience. People have alarms set to shock them out of sleep. And then the first question in so many people’s minds is, what’s the time? Am I late? How fast do I have to be? How much do I have to do? And this compression of time, and that coercive sense of being trapped by the clock, and not feeling your own pace through your own day, is extremely stressful
Jay Griffiths
Culture
We can look outward, to all the cultural ways humans have reckoned with time. Calendars, time zones, zero years (“epochs”). How and whose time is or isn’t valued. The nature of nostalgia. These are the ”Culture” aspects of time.
If the Saka calendar mirrors the moon, the Pawukon calendar reflects the island’s spiritual and agricultural rhythm. It is a 210-day cycle divided into thirty weeks, each called a wuku. Every wuku has its own name and significance, from Sinta (the first wuku) to Watugunung (the last). After the thirtieth wuku, the cycle restarts, creating a continuous loop of time.
What’s New Indonesia
Craft
This is the big one.
The other sections could be the subjects of a philosophy course anywhere, or even just a fun nerdy conversation over cocktails. But the “Craft” layer connects Time to ITP quite specifically by looking at all the ways people have invented for “keeping time” (what a lovely phrase!). Not just recently – the Antikythera Mechanism is over 2000 years old, a kind of analog computer the tracking planets, sun, moon, and a complex civil calendar. Before that there were sun dials, hour glasses, clepsydras and calendars; after, the astronomical architecture of the Mayans, Su Song’s water clock, the escapement, quartz crystals and cesium fountains. The history of technology, and especially the thread of time keeping, is an inspiring collection of ingenious devices in the service of human curiosity about the world.
Also – not to put too fine a point on it – clocks are literally embedded in the root level of our digital technology. Clock ticks drive forward each step of every digital action. If we were to slice open any modern chip, a big part of the complexity we would find inside would be the “time tree”, a fractal trace that distributes clock signals to each of the components. Understanding this helps us gain deeper fluency with the technology we use in projects.
I think its fun and inspiring to look at old, even ancient, technology. But these objects have additional specific relevance for us, in that they had to solve problems of information design and data visualization. In “keeping time” timekeepers had to visualize time for users, so we can look at actual millennia of interfaces. We can appreciate the subtle design choices, material selections, and geometry behind those information displays.
These are subjects of the “Craft” section and form a very direct link to the material of the program.
Thus this singular artifact, the oldest existing relic of scientific technology and the only complicated mechanical device we have from antiquity, quite changes our ideas about the Greeks, and makes visible a more continuous historical evolution of one of the most important main lines that lead to our modern civilization.
Derek de Solla Price, Gears from the Greeks
Media
The media section captures a few of the ways time is dealt with in poetry, film, and fiction, especially science fiction. We also take a special look at music, which organizes time on many levels (frequencies, envelopes, rhythms, compositions, styles).
It’s an oldie where I come from.
Marty McFly, Back to the Future
Scale
Time is so totally humungous that it takes special mental tools to even try to think about it. For reasons noted above, this applies to space as well. We can use imagination, observation, and logic to try to answer the question “when are we?”
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy