Digital calendar uses spiral form to show passage of time

Most people probably don’t have calendars in their homes since you can just look at your phone or your digital calendar to check out what day it is. I still prefer to have something you can look quickly at a glance and I also have several planners so that’s not really a problem for me. But what if you had something that not only just tells you the date but will also make you reflect on the passage of time and how the days flow? Jaekeun Lee’s Spiral Timepiece reimagines the conventional calendar, presenting a poetic and multidimensional perspective on time.

As the inaugural piece in his ongoing project Provisional Tempo, this 12-month digital calendar replaces linear grids with a dynamic spiral of Earth-like globes, each representing a month in a continuous, evolving cycle. Rather than depicting time as a straight line or a closed loop, the Spiral Timepiece adopts a spiral form that allows for both return and change. Each month is represented by a rendered image of Earth-like beads arranged along a spiral curve. The form suggests cyclical motion, but subtle variations in spacing, lighting, and elevation reflect the idea that no moment is simply repeated. In this work, time is not measured in fixed units, but traced through movement, difference, and atmosphere.

Designer: Jaekeun Lee

The Spiral Timepiece features 3D-rendered compositions constructed from both procedural modeling and photographic textures. Particularly, Jaekeun Lee has derived Earth and cloud visuals from NASA’s Blue Marble dataset, with month-specific versions applied individually to each globe.

Arranged in a spiral that progresses clockwise, the entire structure rotates slightly each month around its central axis. A gravitational gradient runs through, depicted by increasing curvature and compression toward the center, where orbits tighten, and mass appears to intensify. The designer has also randomized the rotational axis of each globe, introducing variation within the overall continuity of the system.

The Earth-like beads appear in three variations: one version includes the year along the equator and the month number at the poles; another uses nighttime satellite imagery to mark January 1st and all Sundays as holidays; the third represents regular weekdays. These variants are distributed across the spiral according to their temporal function.

It operates not as surface ornament but as an underlying structure, inviting us to reimagine time, not as a straight line to be followed, but as a rhythm unfolding in recurring motion, with difference. It departs from the linear directionality that presumes a defined beginning and end, and from the closed loop that assumes static repetition. The spiral instead allows for a layered temporality, one that revisits familiar points without returning to the same state.

The Spiral Timepiece is available as a high-resolution digital download (3840×2160) through Lee’s website, Provisional Tempo. Each year, at the end of December, the Spiral Timepiece is updated and made available as a downloadable set of high-resolution images through the project’s website.