Ches and I had never heard about Christian Marclay's acclaimed installation The Clock 2010. This blog is as much for us as anyone else, so that we will remember an amazing experience.

It's on at the Tate Modern until mid January and Drew and Keith had been to see sections of it three times.

Earlier in the week when we had been walking to catch the bus, Drew pointed out that just a couple of hundred meters from Clare's house opposite London, City University was the building in which Christian Marclay had worked on building this work.

We walked around 400 meters to catch the bus into St Pauls. From St Pauls, we walked across the pedestrian bridge to the Tate Modern and at the entrance watched the last three pieces of an arctic glacier melting on the forecourt. Huge slabs of glacier have been melting and their blue core fading as the exhibit nears the end of its life.

Inside, the first floor is like a bridge linking the old power station with the modern extension at the rear. It overlooks on both sides the floor of the Turbine Hall. I remember Kent telling us about an exhibit in 2007 that was used to promote a "living wage" for staff of the Tate Modern.

"A crack in the floor of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern in London. Shibboleth was the title of a temporary art installation placed by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo in the Tate Modern in 2007. The work took the form of a long crack in the floor."

Not only were there occupational and health issues with a number of visitors falling into the crack, but the London Living Wage Campaign used it to demonstrate how there was a growing gulf in wages. Most of the cleaning staff of the Tate were working up to three jobs in order to earn just enough to live on. Forget a basic wage, this is just enough to pay rent, eat, clothe and pay fares to get to work. Ironic hey!

Well, the crack is no more, both physically and metaphorically.

We went straight to ""The Clock". Drew reckons it's the first time there hasn't been a queue. Given it was 11.30am and that usually draws a massive crowd eager to see what happens at midday, we were lucky. We secured a seat on a couch. It's like a movie theatre with 3 seater couches seating maybe 300.

There is a three minute film on Youtube however the site wont allow me to post hyperlinks. It is well worth looking for. Just google "the Clock' on Youtube.

It's not just a lot of film clips linked by visual clock times, it's using the music from one film to link a number of clips form multiple films and using multiple clips from a film to link to a conclusion. For example there are multiple clips from a movie about a woman about to be executed in a gas chamber. Repeatedly going back to clips as the time counts down, there is always a scene of people gathered looking through the glass into the chamber. When she is finally executed, it switches to a scene of two people looking through a glass window and pulls back to reveal they are in a ticket box at a movie theatre and the movie is "Time Bandits". Lots of clever links like this abound, and you end up doing more than just identifying actors and movies. If that's all it is, you'd get bored fairly early on. We watched for a little over and hour and a half and loved the midday blending of scenes from "High Noon" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" with myriad other movies midday clocks.

"24-hours long, the installation is a montage of thousands of film and television images of clocks, edited together so they show the actual time. It is a thrilling journey through cinematic history as well as a functioning timepiece.

Following several years of rigorous and painstaking research and production, Marclay collected together excerpts from well-known and lesser-known films including thrillers, westerns and science fiction. He then edited these so that they flow in real time. When watching The Clock you experience a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes."

"well it took a long time before I actually started to work on it. I was moving from new york to london, following my wife, who got a good job there. I found myself not having a real studio and not quite sure how to get to work. it's always the challenge as an artist because you don't necessarily have an office to go to… thank god. but it's still a challenge and so I had a lot of time on my hands. 5 years prior to moving, I didn't think it was possible, and I was full of doubts. I didn't really know if it was possible to find every minute of the 24-hour cycle within the history of cinema, within 100 years of cinema. at that time, I was working on a project called 'screenplay' which was about the process of making music live and I wanted to mark time - important for musicians -, and so I looked for some footage of clocks in films. yes, that was the initial idea, me and my research assistant watched films all day."

24 Hours Inside the Christian Marclay Installation 'The Clock'

By Holly Williams

LONDON — Christian Marclay's video installation "The Clock" is functional: The 24-hour montage of film and TV clips featuring clocks and watches actually tells the time.

It also leads you through a century of cinema history, like a high-art version of the pop culture supercut. We go from the Marx Brothers to "The Matrix," "Annie Hall" to "Zoolander." There are several Sherlocks, many Bonds.

"The Clock" has become a sensation around the world since it was first shown at the White Cube gallery in London in 2010. But given that the clip-gathering was done by a team of movie-watchers in the city, its arrival at Tate Modern feels like something of a homecoming. (It runs through Jan. 20, with 24-hour screenings on Nov. 3 and Dec. 1.)

Mr. Marclay insists that any gallery that wants to show "The Clock" must have some overnight screenings. "It's a work that can be very deep if you want to dig into it, spend more time with it," he told reporters at Tate Modern in September.

Clock-watching for 24 hours, literally, might sound like torture. But "The Clock" is strangely addictive, and visitors often stay much longer than they had intended. You can't lose track of time, and yet somehow it runs away from you.

The little-seen portion from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. was the trickiest to craft, Mr. Marclay explained: There simply aren't that many clips. Yet this is also where the real-time identification by the viewer can be most profound. "I really liked the idea of someone going in and out of sleep while watching these dream sequences, you become part of this thing," Mr. Marclay said. "That's the magic of this piece: It's really about you."

The thought of bedding down for the duration is tempting, then, but also alarming: Will it feel like time well spent, or time wasted? I went to Tate Modern's 24-hour screening on Saturday, to watch my life tick away.

10 a.m.

I slip off my shoes and settle on one of the white Ikea sofas that fill the room. It's not long before I've seen the first of many clips from "Back to the Future."

There's a black-and-white chase through a London Underground station, intercut with a full-color race through a New York subway. It's typical of how Mr. Marclay stitches time together, finding sly visual rhymes across clips. There is real pleasure in following yet subverting cinematic grammar: A door opens in a scene from a silent comedy and a '90s movie star walks through it. Tea is poured in one decade and drunk in another; a bomb goes off and a petal softly lands.

Noon

A clip from "High Noon," of course. The tension always ratchets up at the top of the hour — and then a sizable chunk of the audience leaves. It's hard to quit "The Clock;" it tantalizes, yet never provides a narrative resolution, so you never feel sated. The hour striking offers an exit in a work of art with no beginning and no end.

Not that everyone feels the thrill. In the daytime, a crowd of different ages and ethnicities flows in and out, some unmoving for hours, a few lasting only minutes.

1:13 p.m.

Another classic: Orson Welles in "The Third Man" reflects on how "500 years of democracy and peace" in Switzerland produced only "the cuckoo clock." Mr. Marclay is half Swiss, I remember; is "The Clock" a grand riposte to this mocking of his nation's invention?

3 p.m.

The midafternoon slump hits. Perhaps because my body is busy digesting a sandwich, my brain's ability to digest what's going on in front of me fails. I watch time's relentless march, but it doesn't feel even: It can speed up, but right now, it's slowed down. Next to me, a woman nods off.

No one onscreen seems satisfied with time either: They either have too much, or not enough. Everyone seems to be waiting, or rushing.

6:45 p.m.

We're outside Tate Modern's normal hours now, and there's a new buzz around the place. A D.J. is playing in the bar downstairs — which is staying open all night — and there's a line outside "The Clock" (maximum capacity: 150).

On screen, the evening is in full swing, too: Audrey Hepburn gives a party in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and Tom Cruise causes havoc at a private view in "Cocktail" (Mr. Marclay enjoying the sendup of the art world, perhaps). And I'm having my own upswing too: Time has started flying by again, as poor Julianne Moore is stood up by two different husbands, and Bill and Ted say, "Don't forget to wind your watch."

Midnight

The line at 11:40 p.m. stretches down two flights of stairs; the average age has fallen to around 30, although a few people seem to have brought intrepid parents. It appears that every sharply-dressed hipster in London had the same thought: Get there for midnight. But it's so busy, most won't.

They miss out on a thrilling, second-by-second countdown, cutting from birthday candles to the cancan to a punk concert. At the stroke of midnight, in a scene from "V for Vendetta,"

3.10 a.m.

Longer, more languorous scenes drift dreamily into each other now, as characters battle insomnia, or nightmares. The room is still packed, with dedicated cineastes on the sofas and less-than-sober club kids sprawling on the floor, but others who have been here all day are clearly struggling: The soundtrack is augmented by surround-sound snoring.

By contrast, I feel surprisingly eager, and fully in the zone. I've always liked 3 a.m.; perhaps a quick freshener at that all-night bar helped, too.

4:30 a.m.

"The Clock" has taken a delirious dive into the subconscious: Pupils dilate in close-up, metronomes tick, plugholes spiral. At some point, a scarf wrapped around my head (the space is seriously over-air-conditioned), I start sliding down the sofa and into sleep. When I open my eyes, a wave of blood is gushing toward me, down a hotel corridor in a clip from Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." It's a shock and a wake-up call.

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6 a.m.

Innumerable alarm clocks are ringing in a new day, but I'm still waiting for mine to end. Most people have left now; the 40 or so of us that remain all stretch out horizontally, a sofa apiece. The four hours remaining feel simultaneously like nothing at all, and impossibly long. "You cannot conquer time" says Ethan Hawke, quoting Auden in "Before Sunrise," and I wonder if I'm foolish for trying.

10 a.m.

I emerge, blinking at sunshine reflecting off the River Thames. But I have no desire to throw my watch in. "The Clock" is the perfect work for 2018, feeding our short attention spans until they stretch out overnight. In the relentless hurtle from clip to clip, minute to minute, it is constantly new, always stimulating. Even over 24 hours, there simply wasn't time to get bored.