The Clock by Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay is a 24-hour video installation, composed of thousands of fragments found in cinema and TV scenes that refer to the time of day. The work received the Golden Lion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has since taken thousands of visitors to dozens of museums around the world.

For the exhibition foyer at the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, the communication design was conceived as a contemporary version of old cinema signs, with three-dimensional letters supported by horizontal shelves. GT Haptik was chosen for two reasons: its geometric letters, especially the O that we cut and turned into a C, slightly rotated for its two appearances in the word “CLOCK” (as a reference to the passage of time); and the absence of overshoots in the capitals, which made the lettering installation easier. In addition, a tabloid with the same graphic identity was designed, featuring an exclusive interview with the artist.

Timelapse of the installation of the wall lettering.

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film, The Clock, “samples thousands of excerpts from the history of film that indicate the passage of time—from clock towers to wristwatches to buzzing alarm clocks—that the artist has edited together to unfold on the screen in real time as a 24-hour montage”. It is currently being screened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Walker's in-house design team prepared the related branding and marketing material.

Boris Meister explains the typographic approach on the Walker Art Center blog:

Going for a typographic solution seemed necessary, not only because of the limited amount of imagery available, but also because it would seem very arbitrary and reductive to use five film stills from a movie made of more than 2,073,600 consecutive frames, with no consistent narrative nor leading characters in it. […] After examining a wide selection of typefaces to use, mostly looking for geometric typefaces, the choice was set on Neuzeit Grotesk, designed by Wilhelm C. Pischner in 1932. It’s modest appearance seemed to fit the idea of emphasizing a system over one strong appearance.