Ora Unica by Denis Guidone

Denis Guidone designed this beau­ti­ful watch, Ora Unica (Sin­gle Hour), in which the hour and minute hand look like a sin­gle doo­dle that seems to mag­i­cally morph as they turn to indi­cate time. More details and images after the break.

Impre­ci­sion and defect man­i­fest a full­ness of sense, an inher­ent plu­ral­ism of inflec­tions. These aspects let us cal­i­brate com­mu­ni­ca­tion with an idea of imper­fec­tion that isn’t “neg­a­tive”, but which it sim­ply presents itself as a more com­pli­cated con­cept of per­fec­tion, often an insignif­i­cant and anes­thetic value within its “com­pli­ance” char­ac­ter­is­tics. The imper­fec­tion becomes the “rul­ing prin­ci­ple” of new ratio­nal con­fig­u­ra­tions that cer­tify con­trast, that wish for irreg­u­lar­ity and the break from sym­me­try, which become dis­tinc­tive traits of our times. Ora Unica wishes to be a provoca­tive clock; its aes­thet­i­cal prin­ci­ple is inac­cu­racy. Lack of dis­ci­pline, a child­ish and irra­tional ges­ture to define time, which is pre­ci­sion and ratio­nal­ity. The hour and minute hands are rep­re­sented by a sin­gle line drawn on two cir­cu­lar faces, which turn one inside the other. Both faces together resem­ble a graph­i­cal ges­ture, a doo­dle that changes as time passes.