A new direction

After a talk with Alan yesterday, he made me realise that is it almost pointless to be pumping out endless silhouettes when I don't even have direction. All I have is a word, Time, but what I need to add to that is culture, history, visual aids and some extra to words to add to time so that I can grab interesting parts from each subject at pull it all together to create something awesome.

So what I have been up to is looking at how different cultures perceive time. I have found some interesting things that I never really perceived myself. For example there is many ways a person can view time, we are all seperated into two different groups - Polychrons and Monochrons. Polychrons don't live there life by a scheduled plan, they do more than one thing at a time getting everthing done without worrying about deadlines on their timeline. Monchrons live there lives in the opposite way, there live by a structure plan and will not move onto a new subject if the one isnt finished.

I then started to look at the cultures as a whole, and what I found out was America and Japan live by a very fast timeline. All Americas are working fast to look for that 'American Dream', whereas Japan live fast as if run by time. The japenese tend to feel less rushed than the americans because of their effecient lifestyles, they also have a low tolerance for delay, Yuko Mito author of "Corporate Culture as Strong Diving Force for Punctuality - Another Just in Time" used this as an example - “In most European railway systems, a ‘delay’ is defined as ‘10-15 minutes behind schedule.’ In other words, for example, ‘14 minutes behind schedule’ is still counted as ‘on time.’ This is how European railway companies are able to obtain high punctuality. On the other hand, the definition of ‘delay’ in Japan is more severe; only trains with less than a minute’s delay is defined as ‘on time.’”

I also found cultures on the opposite scale that had no perception of time what so ever, the Piraha Tribe, a small natice tribe of the Amazon Rainforest, their language is limited by just whistling and humming, there is no numbers or letters and nor past or future tenses.

At this point I wanted to add a couple of words to Time to obtain a wider range of research and ideas. So I took a deeper look at Time and how we can see it visually. Time is calculated by lunar activity and adding the Sun and the Moon to time as a concept is an exciting idea for me.

I wanted to incorperate one of the cultures that I had already researched, so I picked Japan. I then took a look at Japanese culture and mythology.

I looked at the sun goddess, Ama-Terasu, she is a beautiful goddess made by the tear of Izangi's lefteye. I also looked at her brother, The moon god, Tsukuyomi, made by the tear of the right eye of Izangi. Ama-terasu and Tsukuyomi have been made to never meet again and that is why the sun is seen in the day and the moon is seen at night.

Ama-terasu