Exquisite Clock (image above of the website) by Joao Henrique Wilbert at FABRICA is currently on show at Decode in London. The work is collectively created by ‘users’ who are invited:

to collect and upload images of numbers that can be found in different contexts around them – objects, surfaces, landscapes, cables… anything that has a resemblance to a number. The exquisite clock has an online database of numbers – an exquisite database – at its core. This supplies the website and interconnected physical platforms. The online database works like a feeder that provides data to different instances of clocks in the form of the website, and installations, mobile applications, designed products and urban screens.

The work makes direct reference to Exquisite Corpse which has been referenced and used time and time again in new media related works. The use of photographs of “anything that has a resemblance to a number” I suspect references the well known art / design school project that everyone (certainly everyone who’s attended an art / design degree in England) seems to have done at some stage, it was called Letters in the Landscape when I did it, where you took well framed, composed or close up photos of your surrounding environment to looks like letters or numbers.

Above is the physical clock designed for the 48th Furniture Fair in Milano between 22-27 April 2009 at Palazzo Borrromeo. Didn’t think much of the clock designed for the Decode exhibition itself and it was hung too high to see properly but this variant has striking similarities to some of the work I’ve posted about before that have a visible use of cables e.g. Less Than Three, Cablogramma etc.