A small monitor on a wall, divided into four, and there is nobody in any of them.
Upper left is a corridor with doors down one side. Upper right is a stairwell photographed from above, the treads catching the light in a run of pale bars. Lower left is a doorway onto another corridor. Lower right is a passage that I could never identify, which I suspect was in the basement, and which I looked for on three separate visits without success.
All four are empty. They were empty when I found the monitor, they were empty every time I passed it, and I would guess they are empty something like ninety-five percent of the hours this building exists.
I have painted a painting of four paintings, which is a thing I have avoided doing until now because it is a device and devices get tiresome. But I could not get away from what the screen actually is. It is a polyptych. It is four framed views hung in a grid on a wall in a dark passage, glowing faintly, showing architecture without figures. Take that description to anyone who knows the tradition and they will tell you what it sounds like, and it sounds like an altarpiece with the saints removed.
The grey of these four views is the hardest colour I have mixed this year. It is not the grey of a wall or of weather. It is the specific low-information grey of a cheap sensor in poor light, which is a grey that has been through an electronic decision about what to discard, and it has a slight green in it, and it goes flat rather than dark in the corners.
Underneath, a cable hangs down in a loose curve and disappears. Nobody tidied it. Nobody was ever going to look at this monitor except by accident, which is the other thing worth saying about it. There is no guard on a stool watching these four views. There has not been for years. The screen is on because it came with the system, and it shows four empty corridors to an empty passage, all night, every night.
The apparatus watches. It has never been established that anyone watches the apparatus.