The Clock, the 24-Hour Montage of Clips from Film & TV History, Introduced by Alain de Botton

To ful­ly expe­ri­ence the clip above, you’ll need to be awake and press­ing play at pre­cise­ly 12:04 am. What you’ll be see­ing is a very small seg­ment of The Clock, a 24-hour video assem­blage that keeps time with clips culled from a cen­tu­ry’s worth of film his­to­ry. Some of these mark­ers are in the dia­logue, but most are shots of clocks and watch­es in which a spe­cif­ic time is clear­ly vis­i­ble.

If view­ing the com­plete piece sounds like a marathon, con­sid­er that artist Chris­t­ian Mar­clay and a pha­lanx of assis­tants spent three years locat­ing and plac­ing the clips and smooth­ing out the result­ing sound­track. Some of these moments came pre­loaded with the import of a High Noon. Oth­ers were of a more inci­den­tal, back­ground-type nature pri­or to being cast in Mar­clay’s project.

Those unable to spend qual­i­ty time with The Clock at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art this Jan­u­ary can get a feel for it via philoso­pher and writer Alain de Bot­ton’s  brief chat with Mar­clay below.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day resolves to use it bet­ter in 2012. Per­haps you should­n’t fol­low her on Twit­ter @AyunHalliday.