Last is a clock that is a record of its own history.
Last is like a familiar analogue clock, it has a second hand a minute hand and an hour hand. The hands are arranged in concentric circles the outermost circle being seconds, the middle circle is minutes and the innermost circle hours. The major difference to a regular clock is that each of the hands of Last are made from a slice of live video feed. As the hands rotate around the face of the clock they leave a trace of what has been happening in front of the camera. Once Last has been running for at least 12 hours you end up with an easy-to read mandala of archived time.

The video feed for Last can be any video source: a camera mounted on the clock itself, looking at what is happening in front of it, a remote camera streamed over the Internet or TV signal fed directly to the clock. The clock can thus display the local space, remote space or media space respectively.

Physically Last works very well on a large display. It encourages people to interact with it (when the camera is in the same space) to create an ever changing, often beautiful, interactive digital painting. It can also be seen as a dynamic aesthetic object, responding to and reflecting its environment while providing an ambient view of the recent history of the space.

Ross Cooper (UK) is a recent graduate of the Interaction Design MA at the Royal College of Art and has a first class BA in Graphic Design from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, where he is now a lecturer. Currently, he is working as a freelance designer and consultant for numerous companies as well as a practicing fine artist.

Jussi Ängeslevä (SF) is a designer looking into embodied interfaces and the blending of the real and virtual. After co-founding the new media agency Prosopon Ltd. whilst an undergraduate at the University of Lapland, he continued his studies in the Interaction Design department at the RCA. Currently, he is based at the Media Lab Europe.