QED projects Christian Marclay's 'The Clock'

QED helped artist Christian Marclay display his latest piece of work 'The Clock' at the White Cube Gallery in Masons Yard, running over 4 weeks during October and November.

The 24-hour film was literally shown 'round the clock' with no break in the screening, and so two projectors were utilised in rotation in order to prevent any possible overheating and damage to the projectors. The Christie HD8Ks were chosen because of their high brightness, high contrast ratio and the cinematic quality delivered by the unique 1200w Xenon lamp. Although the HD8K was first released nearly five years ago it still represents the very pinnacle in HD projection quality and still outshines all other projectors in its class.

'The Clock' is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While 'The Clock' examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching 'The Clock' experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while 'The Clock' tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.

'The Clock' plays with how audiences experience narrative in cinema, examining the conventions and devices through which filmmakers create a persuasive illusion of duration. When watching a film, an audience is removed from normal time and swept up in a new register that corresponds to the narrative at hand. 'The Clock' transforms this condition of cinema: time, in this case, corresponds precisely to the actual time beyond the work. The audience has the peculiar awareness of experiencing a fictional event, or countless events, at what appears to be the same time as when they watch it in the gallery.

Using the medium of collage has been a recurring strategy for Christian Marclay since the late 1970s, when as a pioneering turntablist he began mixing sounds and records, before turning to album covers, works on paper and video. Christian Marclay was born in California in 1955, raised in Switzerland and now lives in London and New York.

To this day the Christie HD8K remains the most preferred projector by many of the world’s leading video artists.