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Time without a clock -Animated

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This is one part of a project on the subject of Prometheus. For those of you who don't know the myth of Prometheus, here is a brief summary (for those of you who already know all this, just skip to the next paragraph):

Prometheus was a titan who helped create humans from clay, and then stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, pissing off Zeus so that he had Prometheus chained to a mountain for eternity while every day an eagle came to eat his liver, which would regrow every night because Prometheus was immortal. After 10,000 years, Zeus let Hercules free Prometheus in exchange for vital information.

So for the project we were urged to think about his experience as he was chained to the top of the mountain - what he thought about, what happened to his mind and body, etc - with an emphasis on time. So what I thought about for this project was how Prometheus would've measured time - if he had a clock, what would it have on its face instead of minutes and hours?
I thought "Well he would obviously measure day and night by the position of/absence of the sun, and he could tell the passing of the months by the moon cycles, and he would be able to tell the passage of years by the seasons".
So, the idea to create Prometheus' clock emerged, and eventually grew into this.

The inner circle of the clock shows the splitting of the day into morning, noon, sunset and night, the day and night being divided (cleverly, I think) by the outline of the Caucasus Mountains (one peak of which Prometheus was chained to).
The middle circle is obviously the lunar cycle, and the red-gold border of the clock is the oroborous, or the serpent eating its own tail that symbolizes eternity.
And the corners are all of the seasons - winter (snow), spring (rain), summer (clouds), and fall (silhouetted leaves) - which also have a sort of day cycle in their lighting - winter is night, spring is morning, summer is afternoon and fall is twilight. These parts also represent the types of weather Prometheu would have had to put up with.
The chains (other than being a handy way to divide the four seasons up) represent not only Prometheus being chained to the mountain, but also how we are all bound by the passage of time.
And finally, the hands of this clock are all styled after eagle feathers to represent the eagle that came to torment Prometheus daily, and the little thing in the very center is supposed to be an eagle eye.

I really like how universal it is - it applies to Prometheus, but it also can work for a lot of other things. I found a lot of this was influenced by the ideas of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung about time, cycles, eternity, myth and the motif of the circle.

All of this was done completely in Photoshop, while the feathers were animated in Flash. It was a lot of work, but I am very satisfied with how it turned out.
Image size
650x650px 345.93 KB
© 2009 - 2024 golddew
Comments3
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NobodysSavior's avatar
Oh my GOD this is beautiful. I can't even tell you... so brilliant... It's completely fantastic. And as a fan of greek mythology I ADORE the prometheus theme. Beautiful, simply beautiful.