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 in the shot), edited to correspond to the installation’s local time. A kind of cinematic capstone of the twentieth century made just as smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, The Clock is suffused with jittery anticipation. Little actually happens in the metamovie, yet the people on screen behold their timepieces with bated breath. What are they waiting for? Time itself.
Artist Maya Man’s A Realistic Day in My Life Living in New York City (2024) updates this script for our voyeuristic present: At the top of every NIST-F2–adjudicated hour, the digital work spams the Whitney Museum of American Art’s website with cryptic text. These mystifying, millennial-pink transmissions—they disappear from browser windows after thirty seconds—are culled from day in the life–style TikToks produced and narrated by New York–based content creators, most of them young women. Stripped of affect and taken out of context, the “realism” referenced by the title is revealed to be farce—if anyone lives like this, they’re less than one Celsius energy drink away from a heart attack. More than anything, Man’s influencers are desperate to flex their mastery over time, surmounting hourly intervals like hurdles in an Olympic sprint.
Our hypersynchronous age has even taught Marclay a few things about timekeeping. It turned out that The Clock’s horology was (slightly) out of joint. When museums screened the film without reset for several days in row, they noticed that it gradually became asynchronous; eventually, diegetic time no longer matched up with the lock screens of viewers’ phones. For the MoMA restaging, Marclay and his team retrofitted The Clock using AI-based software that syncs his cinematic juggernaut with the NIST-F2—periodically, and imperceptibly, cutting scenes to ensure it stays the course. The nature of time has indeed changed for good. Perhaps we will one day forget that it was something we made up to sell Rolexes to executives who keep the rest of us clocking in.
“A much-needed rat’s-eye view of the built environment.”