The awakening

The idea was a few lines: show the time, wake me up every morning, indicate the passage of each hour with a gentle bang, and manage to stand over my stereo. As this space was simply a cubic meter and nature abhors a vacuum, it quickly grew. The alarm clock itself was programmable in 2 versions, the soft one and the terrible one.

The mild version would turn on the stereo for half an hour, then finally turn on the coffee maker. The smell of hot coffee was then enough to make me ruffle my feathers.

The terrible version took fewer precautions. To begin with, a pétanque ball would roll noisily along its tracks, fall into a Plexiglas tube and end up against a stop. A magnetic lift would then pick it up and bring it back up, and the cycle would start again as many times as necessary. Meanwhile, the gong was struck by a clapper, a fan inflated a latex glove, water poured into a glass which automatically emptied into a container when full, a clapper struck a bottle of claret, a hammer stubbornly hammered in its nail, a flashbulb went off at times, and an armada of motors spun in all directions.
This alarm clock also automatically took pictures of people looking at it. It was all

very nice when it was built, but I had to find out when I moved that this alarm clock was… bigger than my workshop door

.

So I had to saw off the base and dismantle it in order to install it in my room. A fountain and a climbing plant were then added to it, a plant that would slowly suffocate it five years later.

This alarm clock was dismantled in 1999 due to lack of space, and its parts cannibalised for other functions. But it had the time to have a nice offspring. Indeed: it called for a real clock to run it. As there was a relatively empty space in front of it, I filled it by making “the Draft” which served as a clock and time display.

Pictures taken by the alarm clock…