three rotating discs replace hands in D1 milano x peter tarka’s ‘impossible watch’
By kat barandy I designboom
Against the polished surfaces of Milan’s watch scene, the D1 Milano x Peter Tarka Impossible Watch begins with a strange little image. It’s a graphic object made of color, depth, and visual contradiction, scaled down until it can sit on the wrist. The proposed timepiece takes the language of Tarka’s digital compositions and gives it a body, and it translates ‘impossible’ geometry into aluminum, glass, moving discs, and a small digital screen.
The project is now live on Kickstarter, where D1 Milano presents the watch as a wearable version of an artwork that first existed as a seemingly unrealistic visual idea. That tension gives the collaboration its pull. It sits between collectible object and functional accessory which uses the familiar format of a wristwatch to make a graphic experiment feel surprisingly tangible.
images courtesy Peter Tarka, via Kickstarter and Instagram
Known for colorful 3D images shaped by floating forms and skewed perspectives, artist Peter Tarka brings a visual language that already feels close to product design. His compositions often look polished enough to touch, even when their structures could only exist in a rendered space. With D1 Milano, that digital surface is pulled into a working format, where the illusion has to hold up through scale, movement, and wear.
The dial carries most of that translation. Three rotating discs mark hours, minutes, and seconds, turning the act of reading time into a small kinetic composition. Seven dots indicate the days of the week, and a digital display gives the day, date, and time in a more immediate way.
D1 Milano x Peter Tarka impossible watch turns digital geometry into a wearable object
D1 Milano builds the case and bracelet in lightweight aluminum, a material choice that keeps the object closer to a design accessory than a heavy mechanical watch. A sapphire crystal with blue anti-reflective coating covers the face, while 5 ATM water resistance adds a practical baseline for use beyond the collector’s shelf. The custom digital movement supports the hybrid layout, where analog motion and electronic display share the same compact field.
The visual effect is somewhere between a dashboard, a digital artwork, and a puzzle. Blocks of color frame the display, while the discs move at different speeds across the face. Instead of hiding the timekeeping system behind traditional hands, the watch lets the mechanics become part of the image. Reading it takes a moment, then the structure clicks into place.
the proposed watch uses three rotating discs to mark hours, minutes, and seconds
D1 Milano’s collaboration with Tarka also says something about the current appetite for objects that move between screen culture and physical design. Watches have long carried symbols of precision, status, and personal taste, but this one comes from a different starting point. Its reference is the rendered image, the looping Instagram visual, the impossible room or object that travels quickly online because it feels both familiar and physically wrong.
That makes the Impossible Watch an interesting proposal for a brand founded around design-led watches rather than conventional horology alone. It treats the wrist as a site for graphic experimentation, giving a digital artwork weight, edges, a bracelet, and a timekeeping function. The impossible part becomes less about illusion in the end, and more about how far an image can travel once it leaves the screen.
seven weekday dots and a digital display add a more direct layer of information
the lightweight aluminum case and bracelet give the graphic form a physical edge
This article was originally published by Designboom.