Clockwork orange?

Question

This puzzle belongs to the puzzle series: hyper-modern art

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Some other place in the gallery...

"You know, I really like this piece of art."

"Yes, it's colourful and blinking and stuff. Finally, something which looks really modern to me!"

"No, I didn't mean that. Yes, the paining is nicely augmented with those flashing LEDs and the rotating rings at the bottom, but that was not what I was referring to."

"So what is it then?"

"I like, how the painter has once again managed to cleverly hide the title of the image in the image itself. That's so hyper-modern-art-ish!"

"Hmm, without my HUD I can not see the title anywhere in the image. It is somehow fitting, though. Would you care to explain it to me (once again)?"

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( static 1st frame )

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The task of the puzzle is once again to find a secret keyword (the title of the painting) from the image. Note, that the static image (link below animation) is in theory enough to solve the puzzle. The keyword has more than 4 and less than 12 letters.

Answer 1

The piece is titled

TIMELESS.

Credit to @Deusovi for the final decoding! My original method was overthought and didn't produce readable text, so look to his post for how that portion is done. I'll leave my observations here, as they may serve the wary puzzler looking for more clues.

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• The colored dots around the main "clock" never change. The center ring is the only one that doesn't move with the others. It is colored orange, and the sectors match up with the position of the visible orange dot around the clock. Thus, you can assign the dots on the outer ring like this:

  

• There is a specific pattern to the "blinking" lights mixed with the clocks. This pattern can be used to assign colors to the rings from the inside to the outside like this:

  

• The patterns formed by dots of the same color match a pattern formed by the missing dots of one of the smaller clocks when rotated. This information can be used to assign colors to all the dots on the main clock.

  
  Note that the bright green clock matches with three different orientations. Since the rotation doesn't actually matter in this puzzle, knowing the color association is sufficient.

• The patterns of white bars in the inner grey rings of the main clock also match these missing dot patterns, and can be arranged to line up with the colored dots. This results in every sector (think pie slice) having exactly one highlighted zone.

  

• OP said the solution can be found using only the first frame, which indicates that the specific movement of the inner rings between frames is probably not necessary, but simply hints that they should be moved somehow.

• The weird symbol thing looks like a clock, a colored dot, and a pair of semaphore flags (image provided for reference):

  

• Using this information, lines can be drawn connecting the colored dots to the matching clocks, and when the orientation is corrected with regards to the key, letters from the semaphore alphabet can be read from the hands of the clocks, and read (from left to right) as

  TIMELESS.

Check out @Deusovi's answer for more details about the semaphore translation!

Answer 2

FINAL ANSWER

The puzzle's title is

TIMELESS.

(I'm going to refer to the lower middle assembly of rings as the "orrery", since I need a convenient name for it, and it vaguely reminds me of one.)

Step 1: The Rings

The rings of the orrery all can rotate, as the GIF shows. We have eight rings, eight colored lights, and eight clocks, so the natural first thing to do is to try to associate them. The missing dots from the rings around each clock correspond to the "holes" in the orrery's rings, so that gives each ring a corresponding clock. Then, we can use the lights to align the orrery rings in a way so that every light is used once. With the colored lights given (and one ring already given to us), there is only one possible way to do so. Lord of dark's answer explains the logic in full detail.

Those associations give us this image, helpfully provided by Lord of dark. (Ignore the hands drawn on the lights: they're unnecessary.)

Step 2: Decoding

Now we've used the orrery to match up each clock with a colored light. The bird tells us what to do: those are the standard flags in Flag Semaphore! If we take the direction of each clock's corresponding light as "up", we get letters in Flag Semaphore from the clocks' hands.

Here is the image, with lines from the "head" to the "body" drawn in. (Arrows are used so that lines don't go straight through the clocks.)

Now we can read off the correspondences left to right in order of the heads to get a letter from each one.

Dark blue is north and northwest, which gives T. Red is northwest and southwest, which gives I. Lime is southwest and east, which gives M. Orange gives E. Magenta gives L. Yellow gives E. Cyan gives S. Green gives S.

So the puzzle's title is...

TIMELESS!

Answer 3

Partial answer based on observations by @cyberbit:

The white patterns int he rings of the big clock all match a pattern of the missing points in the small clock.
The middle ring is orange so we can guess that every ring matches a color and we will find the same patterns in the color around the clock. Let's number the rings from 1 (in the middle) to 8 (the outside one). Here is the reasoning to match the rings with the colors :

1. The orange ring cannot be moved without overlapping an other color so we know where to place the 2 other orange points.
2. The only color which can match ring 4 is light green
3. dark blue can only match ring 6
   
4. The only color that matches ring 5 is red
5. Dark green can only be ring 8
6. Ring 3 can only be light blue
7. Pink is 7
8. Yellow is 2

This is the final big clock :

We can now associate each small clock to its pattern color. I have also reported each clock arrows to the corresponding color point.

From here I don't know what to do, I've tried to extend the arrows but it doesn't look like anything...

Answer 4

Answer as intended by OP

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The puzzle has been well solved by cyberbit and Deusovi (with some insights from Lord of dark), but as the path to the solution somewhat deviated from what I had originally in mind, I want to give a 'complete' answer to the puzzle as I thought it would be solved.

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The wheel

The animated, turning wheel shows eight rings of which seven seem to move freely. The innermost, ring remains static and is the only ring which has a colour (orange). The wheel is bordered by dots of which only few show colours.

On closer inspection one can notice:

- The whole circle is split into 24 radial segments of 15degree span each
- There are 21 white patches plus 3 orange ones

Which leads to the hypothesis that one possibly could...

..rotate the 7 rings such that one patch lies in each of the 24 segments.

Matching clocks to the rings

One also notice that the clock faces all show a whole circle of 24 black dots spaced 15degree apart, from which a few dots are removed on each. One can easily notice...

that each ring has segments in a radial distribution which matches the radial distribution of the omitted 'dots' on the clock faces:

etc.

Thus, each clock can be uniquely assigned to a single ring.

Matching colours to the rings

The orange color matches to an orange dot on the outside to which one of the ring-sections is pointing. The other two sections point at black, 'unknown' dots. It seems that there should be a connection between rings an colours.

Seeing that only the 7 white rings move, we can arrange them according to our earlier hypothesis:

We now note,that each ring has one patch pointing to a color and the others to black. Dark green is an exception here, with both of its sectors pointing to dark green, verifying that this rotation is a 'match':

With this, we have uniquely assigned a colour to each ring. We also notice that

the sequence of color-flashing of the leds matches the sequence from inside to the rim. (orange->yellow->cyan->green->red->blue->pink->dark green)

Combining the information

We now have

- Clocks assigned to rings
- Colours assigned to rings

so that we can directly get

Colours assigned to clocks

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Arranging the clocks

The strange drawing in the bottom right indicates that

- clocks need to be attached to their handle (center connection)
- clocks can rotate along their handle (semi-circle)
- clocks 'hang' downwards from their handle (orientation)

If this is done for all of the clocks, one gets from:

to

As verification one can notice that

All clock-hands now point towards 45 degree - spaced angles exactly.

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Decoding the word

With the clocks now all being arranged, the last hint stems again from the little drawing:

visually hinting at

which is a symbol of the semaphore flag alphabet

Using the hands of the arranged clock faces, this directly translates:

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