If you close your eyes and picture a wristwatch, you’ll likely imagine something circular and flat, with 12 numbers and two, or maybe three, hands. The traditional watch is a platonic ideal emphatically lodged in the modern psyche. Or as Mr Martin Frei, designer and co-founder at the independent watchmaker Urwerk, puts it: “It’s a pictogram ingrained in the matrix – something that society wants you to understand from childhood onwards.”

For most of us, choosing a watch (even a smartwatch) is a process of cycling through variations on that pictogram. But for Frei, it’s just a departure point: a baseline left behind in the pursuit of stranger, more exotic concepts. “With watches you see so many versions of the same thing,” he says. “But we wanted to stretch the possibilities and find out what else it could be.”

In Urwerk’s hands, the wristwatch has morphed into an ever-evolving series of cyberpunk devices, bending the principles of classical horology into futuristic new forms. They look like sleek weapons, or futuristic droids, with displays in which numbers spin on rotating carousels, passing through dials resembling sci-fi cockpits. If Tony Stark designed a watch, an Urwerk is the watch he’d dream up. And sure enough, in both Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: Homecoming, it’s exactly what was on Mr Robert Downey Jr’s wrist, as selected by the actor himself.

“I’m interested in the relationship of humans to machines,” says Frei. “A watch is a machine that you wear, but it’s a strange machine, helping you navigate this mysterious thing that is time. It’s interesting to play with that idea, and make people wonder. You get a different interpretation on what that machine means – and maybe what time means.”

Welcome to the strange netherworld of watchmaking’s weird brigade. Here, watches don’t look like watches, timekeeping is a platform for unfettered creative expression and the genius of horological artistry is put to phantasmagorical new uses.

Besides Urwerk’s robot gadgets, there are the high-tech fantasies of MB&F and its Horological Machines. The Breguet-goes-into-space extravagance of De Bethune (literally – Mr Michael Strahan, the TV personality and former American football player, just took one with him aboard the third Blue Origin flight). The retro-futurism of Vianney Halter. The tourbillon-festooned complexity of Greubel Forsey. Even the miniaturised Lamborghinis-for-the-wrist of Roger Dubuis at its wildest. Household names these are not. But for collectors willing to drop six figures on something uncompromising and spectacular, such niche delicacies outshine the traditional trappings of a classical watch.

“It’s almost like street art or pop art – doing something people have been doing for a very long time, but in a totally new way,” says collector and Instagrammer @SFWatchDude, a Miami-based tech executive with pieces from De Bethune, Greubel Forsey and Urwerk. “You see the craftsmanship and the passion right there, but also the amount of thought that’s gone into these things, like Urwerk designing a completely new approach to reading time. For the same price point, what kind of traditional watch can compare with that?”

There is the small issue of actually reading the time, of course. But like anything, you get used to it, says Urwerk collector Mr Daniel McNutt. “It’s still easier than fishing your phone out of your pocket,” he says. “At first there’s a bit of a disconnect, but it’s a very conscious choice to have time delivered that way. My friends think it’s a bit crazy, but I’m interested in the mechanics that go into these things. I just think it’s cool.”

Watchmaking’s weird brigade are sometimes seen collectively as a movement, having emerged at the same moment in the early 2000s. Or alternatively as a kind of subculture, subverting the conservatism of an industry drenched in heritage and tradition. According to Mr Steve Hallock, a US-based dealer specialised in sourcing such watches for clients, that sense of something iconoclastic is fundamental.

“If you’re really into death metal, you know your favourite band is not going to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, and that’s important,” he says. “I deal with super-nerds who are really into this stuff, who love the fact that it has this kind of moat around it, a natural protection from the mainstream.”

And like any subculture, it has its foundational moments – such as the time 20 years ago, in 2001, when Ulysse Nardin unveiled a watch whose name, the Freak, was as provocative as its concept. It placed the entire movement on a rotating platform that became the minute hand. Back then, this was far-out stuff. So, too, was that year’s debut watch from an industry executive called Mr Richard Mille: a £150,000 tourbillon named the RM 001 whose streamlined, high-tech appearance shared more DNA with F1 cars than with the few classical brands whose rarefied territory it was invading.

“That RM 001 was totally, ballistically bonkers,” says Mr Maximilian Büsser, who was then in charge of watches at the jewellery house Harry Winston. “Richard had balls this big to do what no one had done. Things like that and the Freak signalled that we could go crazy, we could go nuts.”

And so he did. In 2001, Büsser launched a programme at Harry Winston championing upstart watchmaking talents through a series of audacious, high-concept collaborations. By 2005, he’d parlayed this model into his own start-up brand, MB&F (Max Büsser & Friends), aimed at creating “kinetic sculptures which, by the way, tell the time”. These can be gloriously nutty, with an aesthetic approach taking in steampunk, Star Wars, bug-eyed biomorphism, and all points in between, melded to profound, innovative horological technique.

“The fundamental principal is to create what you believe in, and the more risks you take, the more you’re terrified whether anyone will get it, the more you will be proud,” he says.

People most certainly got it. This autumn alone, Büsser took home two gongs at the watch industry’s annual awards gala, the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Geneve, launched a dazzling collaboration with Bulgari and grappled with demand that’s seen waiting lists balloon and secondary market prices soar. Amid a pandemic-driven explosion of social media interest and activity, the watch world’s death metal-ers are edging ever closer to the limelight.

But much as Deicide’s “Satan Spawn, The Caco-Daemon” might seem an intriguing but distinctly challenging listen to the uninitiated, is a spaceship-shaped wrist sculpture with a flying tourbillon, spinning turbines and no discernible dial actually something you’d want to… you know, wear? In public? Without being either mocked, mugged or both?

“I’ve worn them to the supermarket and the pub – I don’t think there’s anywhere I wouldn’t,” says McNutt, who reckons developments like the rise of smartwatches and tech-wear have made such unusual wrist gear less of a stand-out statement. “You get more comments wearing a steel Rolex, because people actually know what it is.”

Mr Paul Blandford, a London-based finance professional and collector (find him on Instagram at @f1ptb) worked his way up the ranks of traditional brands before falling for watches of a weirder hue. His prize models include MB&F’s HM9, a bulbous, steampunk evocation of early jet planes, and Urwerk’s UR-103, the sleek watch that made the brand’s name in 2003.

“If you’ve never seen these things in person, you’ll be worried the watch will wear you,” he says of his HM9. “But the thoughtfulness of the design means it wears incredibly well, and you never stop marvelling at the creativity – it just makes you smile. After that, normal round watches are a bit boring.”

Two decades into their voyage towards watchmaking’s freaky outer limits, the makers of weird watches are instead finding themselves strangely close to galaxy’s centre. Lauded online and off, garlanded with awards, sought out by a burgeoning army of collectors, enthusiasts and people who are just curious. And Büsser has a theory as to why.

“We know mechanical watchmaking is basically pointless, but people love it because it’s a celebration of human competence and craft, and we instilled that humanity,” he says. “People talk about watchmaking as art, but you don’t want a gallery entirely full of Rembrandts. You need the Rothkos, the Magrittes, the Giacommetis – that’s what we’ve tried to do.”