Kairos is an oculo-chrono-metric artwork, a seeing clock that combines computer vision and real-time animation to react to viewers in the gallery. With this ability, instead of telling time, Kairos destabilises its own utility as a temporal instrument. Instead it records a different register of time as it responds to being seen with a cascade of playful emoji ‘complications’ which reconfigure the clock’s function.

The artwork’s key attribute is that it is endowed with computer vision (CV); it is a clock with the ability to ‘see’ and react to ‘being seen’. When Kairos detects the face of a viewer it responds by releasing an emoji ‘complication’ from offscreen, a reaction that continues as long the viewer keeps watching the clock. These emoji impact upon and bounce off the simulated hands of the analogue clockface and change the time displayed. As fragments of an ever-evolving digital language, these emoji are symbolic of how our time, communication, and attention is abstracted, distracted, and extracted in our complicated always-online lives. But in the field of horology (the study of measuring time and making timekeeping devices), a ‘complication’ is any additional feature of a clock beyond its display of hours, minutes, and seconds. So in Kairos, the emojis have multiple meanings and functions; they are complications that represent and record our viewing time, but in doing so complicate the clock’s ability to tell another time, and ultimately our ability to read either time. Piling up within the digital clockface, the emojis eventually seize the clock’s mechanism entirely, creating a record of an extended viewing interaction. As long as this seeing continues, the clock will continue to fail, with new emojis appearing even as others burst and disappear. However, once the viewer moves away, the ‘unseen’ clock will return to the ‘correct time’, waiting to see a new face and begin the process again.