Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight.

Midnight Moment is visible on screens from 49th – 42nd Streets in the Times Square bowtie. Prime viewing locations are Duffy Square between 46th and 47th Streets and Military island between 43rd and 44th Streets.

Join Times Square Arts and Christian Marclay on Friday, October 25th at 11:30pm on Duffy Square (46th Street and Broadway) for a special viewing of Chewing Gum.

Now based in London, the world-renowned sonic and visual artist Christian Marclay lived and worked in New York City for over two decades, including a period at a studio in Times Square. In 2016, Marclay created a series of short, stop-motion videos documenting categories of trash he encountered on the street, including cigarette butts, cotton swabs, plastic straws, and chewing gum.

As October’s Midnight Moment, Marclay’s Chewing Gum (2016) elevates garbage to new heights, finding beauty in the crude and ubiquitous gum that blots the pavement. Sequencing countless still photographs into hypnotic animation, squashed gum wads divide, unite, and dance across sidewalk cracks. Marclay takes a playfully literal approach to street photography by portraying his chance encounters with the street itself.

“I’m giving back to the street what came from the street and transforming trash into poetry. The street is always a great source of inspiration, it’s where I take most of my photographs. Showing the gritty sidewalk come to life at a spectacular scale and giving the small, spitted trash a new status is exciting. Maybe the viewer won’t look at the sidewalk in the same way again.”

—Christian Marclay

Chewing Gum is presented in partnership with Paula Cooper Gallery on the occasion of Christian Marclay’s solo exhibition at the gallery from September 12 through October 19, 2019. The exhibition includes the North American premiere of Marclay’s new major single-channel video work, 48 War Movies (2019), which was first shown in May 2019 at the International Art Exhibition of the 58th Venice Biennale.

“The projection of Christian Marclay’s Chewing Gum in Times Square will transform the banal into the spectacular, refocusing the wandering attention of the city dweller to familiar but overlooked details.”

— Paula Cooper Gallery