alt Hacker NewsI get that this is an art project that is supposed to look cool and not necessarily be practical, but...
For practical purposes just having 3 "arcs" (hours, minutes, seconds) would be much more readable.
The "arc" idea already solves problems of relying on orientation and knowing that it is supposed to go "clockwise" (it is pretty funny, that the only word that we have to describe rotational direction is related to clocks).
Before clocks 'clockwise' was called 'sunwise', because that's the direction the Sun moves across the sky in the Northern Hemisphere. Anticlockwise was called 'widdershins'.