The room has been emptied and the light is still going.
Bare boards. A picture rail. A corner where two stretches of failing wall meet under a ceiling that is shedding paint in continents. No bed, no lamp, no chair, nothing at the skirting. The floor has been swept by somebody moving furniture out and it holds a long soft reflection of the ceiling, and because the only source in the picture is the diode, the reflection is red.
That is the whole painting. A red wash across an unoccupied room from a source the size of a lentil.
I gave this one the title everybody’s ear expects, because I wanted to put the old question in the room and then not answer it. If an alarm sounds in an empty room. And so on. It is a good question and it has been asked about falling trees for two hundred years, and standing in that room I found it did not apply, because the thing on the ceiling was not sounding an alarm.
There is no smoke in this painting. There is no fire in any of the ten. I want that stated plainly here, at the third panel, because it does not get any truer later. The device that these ten canvases are about has never once, in anything I have witnessed or been able to reconstruct, reported the event it exists to report. Its entire audible and visible output across its whole life has been the maintenance signal. The red light means low battery. That is all it has ever meant.
So the question in the title has to be rewritten before it will work. Not: does an alarm in an empty room make a sound. The alarm is not the issue. The question is what it means for a device to spend its service life telling a room about its own condition.
It is asking for a battery. It has been asking for a battery since the first canvas. It will still be asking two paintings from now. It is not warning anybody about anything except itself, and it is doing that beautifully, at a wavelength the eye picks up instantly in the dark, with no possibility of misreading.
The room does read it. That is what I found standing there. The boards take the red and hold it, and the wall to the left takes it, and every flake of lifting paint on the ceiling casts its own small red-lit shadow the wrong way round. The room is completely saturated with the message. The room is the only thing left that receives it.
I painted the reflection on the floor last and I painted it too long, deliberately. It runs almost to the bottom edge. I wanted the signal to have gone somewhere, to have arrived, to have been taken up by something. It arrives at the floorboards. The floorboards are not able to buy batteries.