I don't remember when or where I first came across the CW&T Solid State Watch, but the paired-down, transparent digital timepiece stuck in my brain for a long time before I bought it. I was hung up.
While the unique look caught my attention, the watch's functionality — or lack thereof — truly captured my imagination. The time can't be adjusted. The battery will run out and die in ten years.
The retro feel I was initially drawn to undoubtedly comes from the Casio F-91W movement. The little digital display — a classic — was first released in 1989 and is still available in plenty of Casio watches. But seeing it bare, encased in solid resin set in a clear 32mm 3D-printed case, makes it feel fresh and familiar at the same time. While the watch itself is the main draw, the addition of the Nick Mankey Designs lunar grey elastic watch strap printed with a unique numeric code and color label (a signature of CW&T projects) add a pseudo-seriousness reminiscent of Tom Sach’s Space Program: Mars.
While it's true that the watch's retrofuture space-age qualities earn it compliments when I wear it out, I remain enamored with it for its sheer uselessness.
Because the makers of this watch set the Casio movement in resin, wearers can't use any buttons to adjust the time. Not for daylight saving time, not for trips to different time zones, and not to correct for the slow and inevitable adding or subtracting seconds most watches do (it can be up to a second a day). Even the alarm and light functions of the watch are unusable. As a result, it's never a given that the Solid State Watch is on time. When I wear it, I can't be sure if I need to add or subtract hours to know what time it is. CW&T knowingly added a bright orange dot to cover the almost-certainly-incorrect date (the date can't be adjusted after leap years).
All this is to say that the Solid State Watch is kind of bad at being a traditional watch. But the point of this watch isn't to accurately display time. Rather, it aims to change your relationship with it.
CW&T, the award-winning two-person design practice of Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levi, explicitly states that a component of their work includes "…alter[ing] our perception of time…" Their Solid State Watch is just one of, by my count, fifteen time-related projects the two have produced since joining forces in 2009. Favorites of mine include Time Since Launch, a tube with a counter in it that, after you pull the pin, begins adding up seconds, minutes, and hours for over two thousand years (a web version of the same project is here). Or their Superlocal project, a 24-hour clock with indents around the face for placing magnetic balls for "build[ing] your clock around your day, instead of scheduling your day around a clock."
The projects that make up this body of work each highlight the arbitrary and mathematical nature of measuring time. Time Since Launch counts up endlessly from a single point instead of referencing a traditional clock or calendar. In contrast, the Superlocal clock prompts the user to modify the face of the clock to signify what points in the 24-hour day are notable in their life. The Solid State Watch, on the other hand, highlights the arbitrariness of mechanical time simply by frustrating me.
Encasing the watch in resin drastically limits its utility. If I travel with it, it won't tell me the correct time. When daylight saving time arrives, it won't be able to match the new time. It's as if the watch is on its own journey guided by its own logic. Because, of course, it is. All mechanical time is.
In his book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford wrote that the clock,
"…is a piece of power-machinery whose 'product' is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequence: the special world of science. There is relatively little foundation of this belief in common human experience: throughout the year the days are of uneven duration, and not merely does the relation between day and night steadily change, but a slight journey from East to West alters astronomical time by a certain number of minutes. In terms of the human organism itself, mechanical time is even more foreign: while human life has regularities of its own, the beat of the pulse, the breathing of the lungs, these change from hour to hour with mood an action, and in the longer span of days, time is measured not by the calendar but by the events that occupy it."
The Solid State Watch exemplifies the separation Mumford writes about here. Because the watch is too inflexible to match the changing length of days or journeys across time zones, the dissociation inherent in all mechanical measures of time is more apparent.
Calling attention to the mechanical time’s artificial and constructed nature carries the risk of coming off as woo-woo.
Years ago in college, while checking my watch and rushing off to class, some kid leaned out of their dorm room window and heckled, 'Time is a social construct!'. They weren't wrong, but the comment wasn't entirely helpful. Pointing out that mechanical time is, as Neil Postman put it, "…man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created" doesn't necessarily deflate its utility. Mechanical time is fundamental to our world, and I was still late to class.
But the Solid State Watch points to a truth no less crucial than the regimentation of our world by mechanical time. Its stubborn independence reminds me that the progression of my own life can be measured not just in seconds or weeks, but by the beat of my heart and the rhythm of my breath.
