Time: Is it digital? Or is it analog?

While making may way through my usual haunts online, I came across a LiveJournal entry touting "the most advanced digital clock ever!" I was intrigued and took a look at the link: http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/%7Eyugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html, which takes to you a page designed by Yugo Nakamura. (Some of the web design and digital experiments are quite interesting, in particular Selection #5: Amaztype.)

The link above takes you to the "Industrious 2001" page with an animated real-time clock where the letters and numerals are images of handwritten letters and numerals in thick pencil. As the seconds, minutes, hours, and date (though I did not sit and wait to watch the day change) changes with an animation of the letter or number being hastily erased and the successive character written in its place. It is black-and-white and decidedly mesmerizing.

I'm not sure how to think through the project. It's definitely high on the 'neat' scale. But there is a curious comment here on the juxtaposition of the digital and the analog, the virtual and the physical. It's on the tip of my tongue, at the tips of my typing fingers. On a gut level, the clock is nostalgic for me. Very few of us now really work with pencil and paper anymore (much less an actual wooden pencil rather than a mechanical one). The scratch of the HB lead on paper is a happy sound for me. The clock reminds me of all of these things.

More soon.