MARTIN FREI ON CREATING WINDOWS INTO THE COSMOS AT URWERK

Martin Frei's path to watchmaking began not in Switzerland's traditional ateliers but in the creative studios of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), where he studied graphic design, and later at HSLU Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989. It was an unconventional foundation—one shaped as much by experimental art as by formal design education, including video installations made under the influence of artist Roman Signer—and it would prove definitive. When Frei co-founded Urwerk in 1997 alongside watchmaker Felix Baumgartner, he brought with him not the instincts of a horologist but those of a conceptual artist: someone trained to ask what an object means before considering what it does.

As Urwerk's chief designer and creative director, Frei has consistently pushed beyond traditional timekeeping to explore deeper questions about humanity's relationship with time, machines, and cosmic reality. His designs—from the revolutionary UR-103 to the astronomically inspired UR-100V SpaceTime and UR-10 Spacemeter—reflect an artist's fascination with perception and a philosopher's curiosity about temporal experience. The brand's signature wandering hours display, adapted from the 17th-century Campani Brothers' night clocks commissioned by Pope Alexander VII, exemplifies Frei's approach: historical innovation reimagined through contemporary philosophical inquiry.

We spoke with Martin about how his background in experimental art continues to inform his watchmaking, why he views watches as 'philosophical machines', and how different cultures' concepts of time shape our understanding of these objects we carry closest to our bodies.

Your time at ZHdK and HSLU wasn't confined to graphic design — you've spoken about working with Roman Signer on video installations. Were there other mediums you explored during those years? Audio, film, performance?

FREI: We played a lot with this, actually. I was studying art when video art became important. Video cameras were becoming smaller and more affordable, so you could do all sorts of experiments with sound recording and video. It’s an incredible playground.

With the artist group I was part of, United Swiss Artist (U.S.A.), I did an installation with talking heads for our exhibition M.U.S.E.U.M. at the Kunstmuseum Lucerne (16.04–29.05.1994). We filmed ourselves for one hour—four people having a conversation, sitting in a room. We used four cameras, one for each person, so each of us was recorded separately for the entire hour. Then we recreated that moment in the exhibition: we projected the four recorded faces onto four mannequin heads, installed in a dark space, and you could hear the conversation as well. The projections were perfectly aligned to the heads, so it really looked like these four heads were talking to each other. We synchronized everything at the beginning of the hour, but toward the end it would start to drift and converge—that was part of the concept. Every hour the recordings were stopped and restarted. When you entered the space, it felt like seeing four bodiless apparitions reproducing a lived moment. In the conversation we talked about how to actually create the very installation, discussing the details of how to do it. It was amazing—and a bit spooky—how easily you can be tricked by a simulation like that, how communication can be recreated.

In my time as an artist, I played a lot with sound and images. For instance, we did a documentary film in Japan about catastrophes. I travelled in Japan in 1997 for seven weeks to shoot our documentary with Christoph Draeger, an artist friend from art school and member of U.S.A.—who happens to be Felix Baumgartners cousin—and that’s how I got to know Felix the watchmaker my partner with URWERK for almost 30 years. On that shoot, we had a Japanese-Belgian friend, Ali Durt-Morimoto, accompanying us. He recorded ambiance sound constantly, capturing audio on every corner, on every street with a small device. He was always busy with it. We didn’t pay much attention at the time, but his recordings ended up being a really valuable source—a treasure chest, actually—for the film, because we could use the sounds he had recorded for the film. It was a perfect soundscape.

There’s a whole subset of field recording whereby people use piezo ‘contact’ microphones to record abstract soundscapes of metal, wood and other surfaces around the city.

FREI: Very interesting. Back in the day, I had an idea—more on the visual side of things—that comes to mind now. That was to go to art museums with an endoscope camera and to film famous art, like sculptures of Beuys or paintings of Cy Twombly for instance, from very close up. You’re zooming in on it, therefore standing on it, or walking through the whole artwork—like walking on the surface of a painting or sculpture, being in a different visual relation to it. Imagine if you’re inside a sculpture. Imagine a painting with a very voluminous painting style, where you could find yourself almost like on a topography, on a landscape of things. What I understand is, art is also about changing perspective, to look at things from a different standpoint, and to me this goes to a very important point: we as human beings have a way of perceiving things. We have a certain height; we have our senses and our way of understanding reality. But it’s possible with our mind to come up with methods of seeing reality differently.

Because obviously, and this is what Stephen Wolfram says about the ruliad—the ruliad is all the computations existing, and also the ones that are potentially existing. We never see the ruliad in its full unfolding. We actually see the ruliad only partially because of the way we look into it, like insects when they see the colour spectrum differently. What looks “plain yellow” to us may look patterned, directional, or signalling to an insect. So, this, to me, is fascinating. If you as an artist—and that also means as a watchmaker, in a sense—can show what you are showing differently, you get knowledge through it. You are surprised by it. You can wonder about how things can be different. If you indicate time differently, you get different information from what you see about time. This is an interesting insight to experiment with.

To me, whatever you do, you’re trying to find out more about the world and what it is. It’s the work of an artist or of a scientist, and it really doesn’t matter that much from which angle you look at it. But the main thing is that the task is to find out something worthwhile. So, you don’t do it for other motives in the first place—you do it because you’re curious. What interests you is to understand the world you live in. That’s a bit my way of looking at it. Of course, there are quite a few other perspectives as well, but to me, this is what’s interesting. When you do something, you can use that as a catalyst or tool, as a way of getting to know the world.

Speaking of differing perspectives, is time a ‘Trojan horse’ in your work? Using something familiar to make people think about concepts from a new viewpoint.

FREI: It certainly is a part of it, but of course the watch itself needs to be a watch. That’s totally clear. It has to tell the time. It has to be comfortable on the wrist. It has to satisfy these elementary needs and functions and demands that are important to consider. But it definitely can include that creative process in how it’s inspired or created. This is not just a repetition of tradition. It is more about returning to the spirit of how this tradition began, before it became codified.

Going back to the times when our time indication was created by the Campani Brothers, it was a time of inventors. You look at how they did things—they were interested in the world as Renaissance men, as Renaissance people. So, it’s this tradition of invention and exploration that is interesting to consider.

When creating, do you battle between artistic vision and practical function, or do you find harmony between them?

FREI: No, I think if you consider both things at the same time, you can balance them. But with art, it doesn’t necessarily need to serve an obvious purpose. If you create an art piece, the plan is not to reveal too much of its message, because the person who looks at that object has to do the main job. That’s how you define free art; you don’t want to convey a message that is too obvious. It should contain many different things, if possible, but it’s not propaganda. You have to, to a certain degree, mystify what you’re doing.

Now, if you create a chair, one of the reasons why it’s a chair is that you can sit on it. If you create a chair that is upside down or something like this, that maybe does exactly the opposite—that’s art. That’s why watchmaking in that sense is not art, but it can be done by using the same tools or the same ways of looking at things.

If you create an artwork, and this is how I learned it at art school, you want to look at the thing you’re interested in from every possible angle. You use all the senses you have to capture whatever it is that you’re looking at.

That’s why you’re interested in the sound of it, the image of it, all the different cultural meanings of it, whatever else you can come up with. Only when you really have an understanding of what it is, or you think you have an understanding, can you then make a comment on it. And that’s the other important part: you want to comment on it. You want to add your point of view to it. If that’s done cleverly or interestingly, it can become something of value.

Now, if you make a watch—an object like a chair, a pair of scissors, or a knife—it’s very clearly defined by what it has to do. But a watch is a bit more than scissors. Scissors, of course, are an essential thing that you can cut something with, and that has to be the case. Otherwise, they’re not scissors. But a watch is a complex machine, like smartphones.

How does this then inform your approach towards watchmaking?

FREI: Time is strange. I’m fascinated with objects that deal with time, because it is something we don’t fully understand. Philosophers and physicists are struggling with the notion. Of course, Einstein had this big battle with Henri Bergson about what time is, and it looked as if physicists would win over philosophy, or science would win over philosophy, which can never happen. It’s not possible. But as a theme that comes along with that object, it makes it something more than just a pair of scissors. So, you are obliged to think about these things.

That’s why one of our goals was to represent our place on our planet. Astronomy, our place in space, is basically the mother clock of things, the Newtonian mechanics of the skies. What a crazy thing that all these motions are repeating. The sun, the moon, the stars—imagine early humans figuring out these patterns. That must have been quite a revelation.

The Earth travels around the Sun in one year… even though the truth behind it is that we are never at the same place. That’s something our newest watch, the UR-10 Spacemeter, is showing. You’re never in the same place on that journey through space. We are spiralling through space around the centre of the Milky Way, and therefore we are constantly spiralling through the cosmos. It’s an amazing thing: we are never at the same place ever in our lives. Every second we are on a fast ride through space.

These things are big ideas, and it’s cool that with a small object like a watch, you can open up that window into the cosmos and therefore into the philosophical world.

A watch really can be like Pandora’s Box on the wrist, opening up new perspectives in many differing domains of knowledge.

FREI: It’s amazing how you can open up your mind to worlds. That’s the obvious connection, and also the historical connection of timekeeping to astronomy. But as I said, there’s also the machine. What is a machine? That’s yet another interesting concept: why do we human beings create machines? And why do we allow this one machine to be that close to our bodies? Why do we carry it around?

Is it because we are proud that we can create machines? Or is it because it becomes almost like the first external organ of our body, and we are on the way to merge with machines? The machines become closer to us and the other way around. At the moment, when you look at the wrist with the smartwatch, the smartwatch has already merged with you. It’s some kind of technology, a piece of metal, ticking on your wrist. It measures you and it becomes, in this sense, an organ. But it’s already an organ when it’s just the watch, like all these other extensions of our body, like a microscope or a telescope or things like that.

I mean, if you went back in time and told people that in the future our instruments to tell the time would also track your blood pressure, your pulse, it’s mind-blowing.

FREI: Exactly. If you have indications on your watch, those indications can tell you the time. That’s the main purpose, so it has to be able to do that. But it can also give you information about the machine. It can tell you how much energy is still in it. That’s another kind of information you have, like in the cockpit of a car. You observe the machine, and in order to steer, you need this information to properly guide your car through a landscape or through the streets. The watch does that too. It helps you find your way in time and meet people at the same time. That’s one thing. But it can also tell you how much energy is still in it and whether you need to wind it or charge it. And when connected to you, it can give you information about yourself.

What we did, for instance, with the efficiency indication on the Series 210 is show whether you move a lot or not that much, with a mechanical memory of the last two hours. So, it’s a bit like a mechanical comment on the fact that smartwatches track your motion and count your steps. You could easily do something similar with an automatic watch and its rotor. You could translate the winding movements, count the rotations of the rotor, and give information about that. Or simply by measuring how much energy you’ve generated, you could translate that into something different. This reflects not just on the user but explores the relationship between the watch and the wearer.

Your creations seem more self-aware than electronic devices. An Apple Watch only tells you about the wearer, apart from battery level, but your efficiency indication reflects the watch’s own state. Is there something interesting about mechanical watches being more ‘in tune with themselves’ than digital machines?

FREI: Absolutely. So, you’re thinking about what is the machine doing to us, and what are we doing to it? Why do we create machines? It’s also psychology. It’s a question of why we need machines, why we create them. This is another interesting aspect. And then it branches out into the theme of robotics and artificial intelligence. That’s super fascinating.

We are, with the mechanical watch, at the beginning of technology. But, of course, you can say technology is always a part of everything because our hands are technological tools. They were created over time. So, in this sense, technology is the driver. Maybe it’s technology that is actually behind everything. Some futurologists have stated that. But these are another set of interesting questions.

There’s, for instance, this guy, Daniel Strassberg, who I find fascinating. He’s a thinker, a philosopher and also a psychologist. I find his book about spectacular machines super fascinating because he thinks about where the machine comes from, what’s the reasoning behind it. Also, the clock—where does this idea of measuring time come from? And there are all sorts of things like, what effect does technology have on us human beings? So, this is another very interesting field to think about.

Do you consciously explore different cultural concepts of time, or is this something you serendipitously encounter in your travels?

FREI: That’s the sociological approach, and it is something I find super interesting. It’s incredibly fascinating to learn, for instance, that there are cultures that think that when you have a pause or a break, and you’re waiting for a bus or something, time stands still. That’s pretty cool. Otherwise, we in the Protestant world think that we are losing or winning time. That’s a totally Protestant notion of things, and it goes back to the Parable of the Talents from the Bible. In the story, God gives talents to three men. The question is, what will you do with these talents? One man digs a hole and buries the talents to later give them back exactly as he had received them. Another wastes his talents carelessly. And the third invests them and creates value. So, the question is, what’s the right thing to do when you’re given talent? Of course, talent can mean different things. In the parable, it’s coins, but it can also mean your abilities—what you do with what you’ve been given.

What’s interesting is that the Protestant world started to feel that you could steal time from God by not working. They thought, ‘Now we get this chance, and you have to do something. You can’t just sit around.’ And they began to be really stressed about it, which can be productive. That’s one way of looking at it.

But if you have this concept of a break or pause being time standing still, you are a bit more relaxed. Of course, that’s something you come up with if you have to wait a lot—when nothing is happening and there’s no rush. So, you invent the idea that time stands still, which can be quite relaxing. These notions are super intriguing.

I remember talking with a Greek professor about an art piece we were working on about time—moments of past, present, and future. There’s an old notion that we are, as human beings, sitting on top of a wave that runs through space. We look back into the past, and in front of us is the future. We’re rushing on that wave. The Greek professor told us that in ancient Greece, human beings had probably a very different notion of the present moment. For them, the present was a much wider place—just a place they lived in. It wasn’t at all like a wave you sit on and rush through. It was simply where you are.

When you look back in time, you can’t see that far back because you can’t keep all these things in mind. You don’t have the tools to do it. So, you have the grandparents who tell stories about the ancestors, and things very quickly become mythology. In the future, you have the oracle—not scientific extrapolation as we have it, where you can already live ten years ahead. People weren’t doing that. But now, if you’re running a business, you have to plan ahead. It’s amazing how your culture completely changes your concept of what time is.

We’ve gone from a more ‘relaxed’ conception of time to high-frequency trading in milliseconds. The old ways seem appealing, but it’s not realistic anymore, is it?

FREI: Of course, this depends on your culture and way of living. But it’s interesting that concepts of time can change—they’re not universal. Depending on your culture, if you’re from an English-speaking background, you have a different way of thinking about time than if you’re from Brazil. Even though nowadays most people agree you need to be punctual, there are still places on earth where sunset and sunrise dictate what time is. You set your inner clock according to that. This still exists and was much more important earlier in human history.

This fascinates me. For instance, during the French Revolution, they planned to change everything, including time itself. I saw clocks that showed two different displays. One display showed the decimal system with ten hours and the other showed our regular 12-hour system. You might wonder, why 12 hours? It’s confusing and more complicated. Ten hours would be clearer—just the decimal system. So, they tried to switch to ten decimals, but it didn’t work out. Our ways of living are stronger than rational redesign.

The 12-hour system goes back to Sumerian times. The Sumerians counted time in a very specific way with the thumb. They would use the thumb to count the segments of their four fingers: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Because of that, we have this system of 60 minutes and 60 seconds. That’s how we count time, and it’s different from how we count everything else.

Your wandering hours display is quite different from traditional watch layouts. Does this particular time indication have a philosophical purpose beyond just telling time?

FREI: Yes, absolutely. It comes through the particular time indication we use—the wandering hours display. We learned from a professor at the Galileo Museum in Florence that this indication existed before the Campani Brothers, but they became famous for it when they won a contest to create a night clock for Pope Alexander VII.

The Pope wanted a clock that was silent so it wouldn’t disturb his sleep, and visible in candlelit rooms at night. The wandering hours display was perfect for this because it does something interesting: it stores the hours on a mechanism that’s tucked away. You don’t need to know exactly where all the hours are—they’re doing their rotation. Only the current hour is displayed, and it indicates the minutes. It’s the opposite way around from a regular watch, but it’s very easy to read.

But what I find fascinating is what this does philosophically. You have in front of you just that one hour. Not the full day stretched out before you. Human beings, we can’t help it—we have to make memories and predict the future. That’s probably what makes us human. Animals are just in the moment. They react with their instincts, and that’s how they adapt to reality. We have that too, but we’ve lost it to a certain degree because we’re so dependent on our memories and predictions of the future.

A regular watch with hands shows you the past as already used potential, and the future as something still coming. It helps you organise and schedule your day. The watch is still used for that to a certain degree, but now with our smartphones, we have perfect schedules. We can store information, set alarms, and so on.

And therefore, the watch is freed to a degree, like painting was freed by photography. You can use your phone for scheduling, and the watch can now be used for other things. It can become a philosophical machine. With our wandering hours, you’re more focused on the present moment rather than constantly looking ahead or behind. That’s a bit how I see it.

Did the mobile phone set the watch free to be more philosophical and less purely functional?

FREI: Absolutely. I’ve been telling this story since we started using our time indication here, because it comes along with it. This is something you understand when you see it does things a bit differently. You can see the benefits of that. You could say to a certain point it’s a more Buddhist way of thinking about things, where the philosophical insights tell you to focus on the moment, because that’s where paradise lies. Your paradise is in the moment. But of course, in our minds we can travel to the future, we can also be in the past. This is important. We need to do it. But if you overdo it, then you are not living. There has to be a balance.

Going back to the concept of time ‘stopping’ during periods of waiting, nowadays when you see someone on break, waiting for a bus or commuting, the first thing they do is pull out their phone. That stops your connection to your body as a human being, because as a human being, you are in your body. You’re not only a spirit—you’re a human being made of flesh and bones. We realise when we wait for something that our bodies are here. We realise that we are in a body. And if you’re always on your phone, you don’t realise that any more. You’re always only in your mind. We forget that we are actually a body. Maybe that’s a bit like what The Matrix had in mind when you’re swimming in that fluid and all of a sudden you wake up. A watch can indicate that feeling. A watch can somehow make you alert and aware of yourself.

It seems like we’re compelled to fill every idle moment.

FREI: You’re not allowing your body to realise itself, that it is actually existing as an object of mass on a planet, made of material. If you are in your body you too feel gravity, you notice that you have a weight. So, you have to be grounded every now and then and realise that you’re in your body. As human beings, we had this experience much more in the past, when you had to be alert to predators or threats. People would even avoid sitting down, instead preferring to squat so that they could make a faster exit should a dangerous animal come along. There wasn’t really the idea of leisure time until much later.

I find these concepts relating to time fascinating. What Schlossberg says is that the clock was, in this sense, invented already by the rosary, used by monks in medieval time. And maybe the rosary is an older object that goes back maybe to early India or whoever else has this kind of mandala, this kind of prayer beads. The rosary is already dissecting a stretch of time into beats, into units. When you’re praying, if you pray always the same prayer, this is a certain distance, a certain length of time. And you pray a whole rosary, then that means you end up at the right time to now be silent or move to your next task. I don’t know what the monks did exactly, but that idea of a structured day where everything happens rigorously the same every day—this is what has evoked the clock.

What’s the method behind your Instagram account? What catches your eye when you’re taking photos?

FREI: I used to always carry a sketchbook with me. I still do that every now and then, but less often. Now, one important part of that job is the phone, because you have a camera with it. It’s very small, and you can use it wherever you are. If you don’t have time to stay at the place for longer but you still see something interesting, you can take a picture and then later on look at it with a bit more time at hand.

I began to just take photos whenever I see something that catches my eye, that I find interesting. That reflects how inspiration works. You see something somewhere—it can be anywhere, accidentally—depending on how alert you are and how you’re learning about the world. You don’t stop your curiosity. It’s always astonishing how in every moment something can pop up. You can walk by it or see it, realise it, and that can become part of what you’re creating. So, this is a never-ending task for me. Taking pictures is part of the process.

It showed itself to me in a crucial way during COVID times, because that’s the moment where you can look back on things. You go through your pictures; you have time for introspection. That’s something I usually do after every day. I maybe look at the pictures to see what I found on that particular day. I just found out that there are these themes that I talked about before—these are things that I look for. And I used the phone a bit, maybe like Galileo used his telescope.

I found it interesting to create a book with these images. There’s a selection of pictures for every year—obviously many more than what made it in. The selection process itself is a big job. You have to develop criteria, then choose which images best represent each period.

Once you’ve made the selection, you can juxtapose pictures from different days next to each other. As you can see on my Instagram, they may have nothing to do with each other visually, but they’re connected because you lived through them—different impressions gathered in your mind over a day or a week. This becomes an archive of experience.

The book documents the process of creating watches and attending events, but it also shows that’s not the only story. A typical watch catalogue just shows products looking glossy and perfect. It doesn’t show you how that whole thing comes about. So, this is a different approach than regular books from watchmakers about watchmaking. That was the plan—to open that space for our Urwerk fans, collectors, and retailers. You might find a retailer appearing in different moments throughout the book. But I didn’t select the pictures to please anyone. It’s simply how the story unfolds.

It feels authentic, like how social media used to be—people posting 'stuff' that they found interesting, without any sense of performance. Was that intentional?

FREI: I didn’t label it Urwerk because I’m not looking to collect followers. I don’t care. That’s just the opposite of what you usually see. Sometimes I have to admit that when I see that the number is growing, I’m kind of pleased, but actually I’m against it. Everybody is, to a certain degree. But it’s not really—it’s a by-product. The pictures are a by-product. And I was thinking, what do I do with it? If you have the collection in my phone, the phone gets too heavy. So how can I share it? It’s fascinating that the cameras became such an important part of our smartphones. Our understanding of reality is based heavily on what we can see, the visual part of our existence. That’s why cameras have become such an important external organ.