Perception of Time

The human brain develops a sense of time shortly after birth, and we have no perception of it before that point. It's similar to a dreamless night, or the state of a patient in a deep coma. Those periods feel like jumps between moments, with nothing accumulated in between, no memory of the space that passed.

Even outside those extremes, our hold on time is loose. We regularly experience a mild loss of time localization, known as dyschronometria, during intense neural activity: recalling a difficult memory, sitting with stress, or even being completely calm. The sense of time fluctuates with attention and emotional state, it slows in some moments and speeds through others, while the clock keeps moving at the same rate the whole time. Deep focus, boredom, fear, grief, and sleep all stretch or compress duration in different directions, sometimes pulling a person's sense of "now" away from where their body actually is.

Perception of Time is built around a single shape seen from two angles. From above, it's a circle with one dot, moving at a constant, unchanging pace, mechanical time, the kind a clock measures, indifferent to whoever is experiencing it. From the side, that same circle becomes a long, folding, overlapping line. The dot is a person, and the line is what time looks like once it passes through what that person feels, remembers, and pays attention to, at any given point.

The piece moves through states where that line stays close to the circle, and states where it pulls far from it, without naming which is which. What it holds onto throughout is the idea underneath all of it: the clock never changes, but almost nothing about how we live inside it stays constant.