Somebody turned it, or something hit it, and now it is looking at a wall.
I do not know which. I arrived on a Tuesday in the fifth month and the housing had swung about seventy degrees on its bracket and was aimed at blank render two and a half feet away. The mount was not broken. The bolt had simply gone loose enough to let the whole assembly rotate, and then it had rotated, and then it had stayed.
It stayed for eleven weeks. I checked. I have a note of every visit and it was pointed at that wall from the middle of the fifth month to the beginning of the eighth, and in all that time the building it was installed to protect was covered by nothing at all on this side.
Nobody noticed. That is the painting.
Not the vandalism, if it even was vandalism. The eleven weeks. Somebody paid for this system, and somebody presumably still pays a monthly fee against it, and for a quarter of a year it was photographing render from a distance of thirty inches, and no person in the chain of responsibility looked up.
The red diode is lit. I will keep saying this in every one of these until the housing comes off the wall, because it is the mechanism of the whole thing. From the ground, at night, at a glance, this camera is indistinguishable from the one in the second panel. Same silhouette, same red point, same authority. A person coming into this alley adjusts their behaviour for it exactly as much as they would for a working one, because the information available to them from ten feet below in the dark is the red point, and the red point has not changed.
I have painted the slack in the cable carefully. When the housing turned, it took up the loop that the installer had left, and there is now a tension in the line that was not designed to be there and a small kink where it leaves the conduit. That kink is the only part of the picture that records the event. Everything else looks deliberate.
Which is the difficulty with these objects generally. They are always pointing somewhere, and pointing somewhere always looks like a decision.