Alarming Clock UNICEF from Chris Purdie on Vimeo.

The inspiration for Alarming Clock came from the feeling of being disarmed and disenchanted by the overwhelming amount of horrible news happening around the world, reported in the news, but made to feel entertaining or pacifying. I was impressed with the scrolling text on most television news programs, one bad thing after another. We become desensitized and either stop watching or stop paying attention. Not because we don’t care but because there is so little if anything we can do to keep up with so much corruption and bad behavior. Alarming Clock was meant to move people to a similar reaction. I replaced the digital clock with a few extra seven-segment LED displays to be able to have scrolling text where numbers would normally be displayed. The text is statistics about poverty in the United States, statistics about poverty in third world countries, and information about global warming. The pace of the text, the small amount of letters displayed at any moment (five letters at a time), and the strange letters used due to the limitations of the seven-segment LED display require the viewer to maintain a trance like focus. An alarm clock is meant to wake us up by the sounding of an alarm but not actually cause any alarm, commonly only causing us to push the snooze button and go back to sleep. I felt this object, coupled with the content and delivery of the scrolling text, would be a poetic statement about the helplessness we feel when we hear of horrific news from around the world.

Alarming Clock – Snooze 1 from Chris Purdie on Vimeo.