How do you tell time?

Kalyani Tupkari

Calendar Collective is a living archive of alternate calendars. It is an ongoing investigation for collecting, cataloguing, and publishing calendars that are little-known to our world. We use openly contributed voicemails as our unique research material. The archive offers an uncommon collection of calendars traced through these unwritten and incongruous fragments.

Call for contribution
We are open most days about midday, seldom as early as the daybreak, some days as late as dusk. We close about when the sun goes down or twilight and occasionally at midnight but sometimes even beyond midnight. Some days we are not here at all, but lately, we are here most of the time except when we are somewhere else. So, if you would like to contribute, please leave a voicemail at hello@calendarcollective.com.

This glossary is only a beginning. Its richness lies in the diversity of experiences it can hold. I’d love to keep expanding it—with you. Share your encounters—specific or vague—that might otherwise slip through the weave of language at www.glossaryoftime.com.

There are many ways to tell time—mine begins with the moon. Kojagiri Purnima is a harvest festival celebrated under the full moon in Maharashtra, India. On this night, families gather to sing and sip warm, nutty milk—marking the end of the monsoon. After moving to the United States, I realized I hadn’t noticed the moon in over a year. Seventeen full moons had passed, unseen. The clocks and calendars on my phone marked hours and months, but not the moons.

Modern timekeeping tools—our clocks and calendars—treat time as linear, objective, and inert. They are precise but often divorced from the natural world. In contrast, time in a social, cultural, and ecological sense is irregular, subjective, and deeply relational. It's a system we’ve collectively agreed upon, which means it can be reimagined and redesigned. And when we reimagine time, it changes how we live.

Calendar Collective looks at this on a large scale—how the way we structure time shapes the rhythms of life. It presents a mix of historical and fictional calendars to challenge the assumption that our current system is natural or unchangeable. It examines how we collectively perceive, inhabit, and value time.

Glossary of Time, on the other hand, zooms in. It uncovers the everyday experiences of time that often go unnoticed, highlighting how we perceive, inhabit, and value time on a personal level.

Calendar Collective

Calendar Collective—a living archive of alternative calendars, real and imagined, traced through voicemails. Through audio vignettes, it offers visitors many worlds with many possible natures of time.

Calendars and clocks play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our perception of temporality. However, these tools are not neutral; they codify values and influence behavior while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we perceive it. Calendar Collective focuses on the ‘aesthetics of unreal time’ by mutating the visual design of calendars, distorting expectations, and creating calendars that live between the possible and the impossible.

In various participatory workshops I conducted, participants were able to unravel the values and assumptions embedded within these calendars. For example, the Even-Odd Calendar—with its asymmetric structure—sparked conversation about the uneven access to time, particularly for night shift workers. The Sun Calendar prompted reflections on access to sunlight in a city like New York, inviting participants to imagine an entirely restructured urban landscape. The Moon calendar made them ponder over our bodily links to natural rhythms.

These alternative calendars were personal and local. Though less predictable and precise, they revealed who or what is in relationship with others—and how. Through these conversations, participants began to uncover the deeper values embedded in the ways we mark time.

Interactions with participants from non-Western cultures—including my own—expanded my perspective. They reminded me that other ways of perceiving and inhabiting time have always existed, and still do. They brought me back to a core idea—time is malleable. Clocks and calendars are conventions—designed tools that can be reimagined.

Incomplete glossary of time

For my next experiment, I moved from measuring time to feeling it. This glossary offers ways of ‘feeling’ time and more importantly, naming what we feel—which is fundamental to sense-making. These words give form to the unexplored nooks of everyday life—leaky sensations, flickers of feelings, in-between moments, and fleeting experiences that can be named but don’t seem to be.

We carry textured experiences of time, yet the English language offers us little vocabulary to express them. We tend to describe time in terms of speed—fast or slow—or direction—forward or backward—but our lived experiences are far more nuanced. There are gaping holes in the temporal lexicon that we don’t even know we’re missing. When these experiences remain unnamed, they remain unknown and become lost.

To start building this vocabulary, I tinkered with AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude. I fed prompts—each describing a fleeting or elusive temporal moment—to generate new words. I often began with something specific, like the moment before a sneeze, but the models would expand the idea, offering unexpected variations. What started as a playful experiment soon leaned into AI’s ability to hallucinate—to bend language to conjure the unreal, while embracing the strangeness of algorithmic text.

These archives offer alternative ways of not counting, but of occupying time. They loosen the grip of clock-time, revealing the layered, coexisting temporalities beneath the surface and inviting us to attune to other ways of sensing time beyond the tick-tock. In doing so, they allow us to inhabit time in ways previously unimagined or unimaginable.

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