Ressence built a successful brand around the visual trickery of making mechanical watches look like moving sculptures, hemispherical high-resolution screens or some combination of the two.
But a new collaboration with Japanese visual artist Terumasa Ikeda advances the brand’s mind-bending horological geometry to a point that resembles sci-fi tech. And it is done with conventional materials and ancient Japanese crafts updated with modern tech.
The Type 9 Ikeda is built on the most straightforward, time-only Ressence model, but the dial Ikeda designed and crafted is nothing short of extraordinary. Even if you can’t read the time, which admittedly took me some effort to figure out, it is a mesmerizing work of art that straps to your wrist.
After getting your bearings on the neon cyber-punk cyclone dial, you’ll notice three concentric circles, with the smallest rotating inside the middle one, which in turn, rotates inside the largest. All while the largest circle rotates around the dial.
A line of tiny multicolored rectangles cutting across the large circle is the minute hand. It points to a dash minutes track cut into the titanium bezel with a glossy DLC coating.
