Time ain’t what it used to be. From the epoch of the sundial to the era of manual wristwatches, its nature (an objective phenomenon? a subjective sensation? a physical dimension?) was a source of endless philosophical debate. But a less abstruse understanding of time (a unit of labor!) settled into popular consensus, with methods of calculation relentlessly optimized to match. The smartphones and -watches we rely on today are not only kept in steadfast synchronicity with one another, they also respond to tiny temporal correctives issued by NIST-F2, an atomic clock located in Boulder, Colorado, that can calculate the second with an accuracy of 10-16—meaning that your boss could theoretically know if you show up to the meeting so much as a millisecond late.
Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), on view at the Museum of Modern Art from November 2024 through this past May, is cult viewing—a twenty-four-hour supercut comprising thousands of clips from films and television. Each snippet contains some circadian reference (usually an actual clock…