Thirteen green lamps, and not one of them is attached to anything.
The object leaning across this frame is a front rail out of the third cabinet. Two metres of folded steel, punched the whole length in the standard square pattern so that equipment can be bolted at any height. I unbolted it, walked it out of the frame, and left it resting at about twenty degrees against the cabinet’s own upright, standing on the castor at the foot. It has stayed there since. It is more interesting out than in.
Between the mounting holes I drilled thirteen seats and pressed thirteen green lamps into them, wired down the back in a loom and run off a twelve volt brick sitting on the floor behind the frame. The black hook and loop strap around the middle of the rail is holding that loom against the steel. It is a working strap doing a working job, which is the only reason it is in the photograph.
Six seconds at f/5.6. The lamps are the only source, so the steel takes their colour and goes olive, and the drilled holes and the screw heads and the small welded tab at the top all come up out of the black at whatever distance the green happens to reach. Nothing else in the bay registered at all. I did not add a fill. A fill would have made it a portrait of a rail, and it is not that.
Green is the colour engineers chose for the message that nothing has happened. Amber says look at this eventually. Red says look at this now. Green says there is no news, and it says it continuously, at whatever rate the lamp is driven, for as long as the machine is powered. A room of these is not a room of celebration. It is a room in which several thousand small mouths are announcing the absence of any event, all night, to an aisle with nobody in it.
I wired thirteen of those announcements by hand, over an evening, with a soldering iron and cold fingers. Then I took the rail out of the cabinet, and I did not put it back, and that is where the picture is.
The choir is not in the church. It is a part that has been removed from the structure and it has gone on singing exactly as it did when it was bolted in, because nothing about a status lamp depends on the status of anything. It reports that all is well. It is lying on the floor. Both of those are true simultaneously and neither of them contradicts the other, and I do not think I could have arrived at that by painting it, because a painter would have had to choose whether the rail was in or out and would have chosen in.