Clock 11 is a semi-serious attempt to illustrate an idea which emerged from from my graduate research: so-called `grazing catastrophes.` The tracing dots which draw this clock's image are bound to the large source which is in turn bound to the clock hands, as in Clock 6 and others. In such a system, the trace particles, which are subject to light friction, are bound to always return to similar trajectories around the source. However, the accelerations of the source particle near the clock hands can amplify small differences in trace particle paths in such a way as to fling the trace particles far away, at which point they make linger for awhile until they are picked up again.
The trace particles take their color from their spatial relationship to the clock hands - if the clock hands were stationary, then eventually the space of the clock would be filled with a static color distribution determined by the hand positions. However, since the clock is always moving, the points will always trace out unique colors.
Occasionally, the source point escapes from the clock altogether. This is kind of a bug, but in the spirit of generative art, I'm not bothering to fix it. At some point the piece just decides to be finished.