Clock-hands motor idea

The idea for the melting clock hands were inspired by a concept I discovered at the Braidotti Summer School in 2013, called Duration (Braidotti/Deleuze/Bergson). I have since written about this concept when investigating the artistic encounter, where I described the encounter as a "heterogenous duration" (borrowed from Guattari). In attempting to explore what this means, I can only understand it by connecting it to the momentary experience I experience when encountering art that moves me or when I have a new idea for a new art piece, or the experience of enduring when I am in the midst of sculpting and sanding (my fingertips off!) and the hours fly by. The latter is not so momentary, but when the zone is reached (what I think Cézanne would call 'iridescent chaos'), time has no meaning. This is when the concept empty time (Proust/Deleuze) can be introduced in order to make more sense of this description.

Due to all these reasons, I did not want the clock hands to turn in their normal fashion. I needed them to be different, to make time mean nothing. I thought of Alice in Wonderland and the White Rabbit's clock however, upon research I found that copies of White Rabbit's clock featured only backward numbers and clock hands that went the opposite way. Instead of producing deviations on the same time, I wanted the hands to operate with a counter rotation - where one hand went one way, and the other went the opposite way. So it didn't appear as though time was going forward or backwards, but both and neither!

Therefore I began researching and trying to source a "battery operated DC motor with counter rotation", the first relatively helpful source (first picture) I found was too far out of the budget, so I went to my local model toy shop to ask for help. The owner sold me a DC motor and said I'd have to try using cogs and rubber bands. I later went to Argos to buy a K'NEX motor as a back up plan.

*This blog post has been back-dated for continuity purposes. Screenshot and photograph were originally taken in July 2016.