There is a disc of cream plastic on the ceiling and a red point of light on its face.
Everything else in the painting is a bedroom at two in the morning. A lamp is on somewhere at the lower left, out of frame, and it lays a long dull shine across the ceiling paint, which has alligatored into a crust of small islands, each one lifted at its edges, each one throwing a shadow about a millimetre long. That crackle is a hundred years of overpainting and it is the most detailed passage in the picture. Below, a bed. Bedding heaped over somebody. I did not paint a face and I did not want one.
The device is mounted where the code says to mount it, which is on the ceiling and away from the corner, and it is doing what such devices do at night, which is to say nothing and to be almost invisible until the eye catches the light.
I painted this one first because I thought it was the calm before the series. I was setting up a sleeper and a guardian above the sleeper. There is a whole tradition of that arrangement and I was pleased to have found a version of it in cheap moulded plastic.
Then I stepped back and saw that the red light was already on.
I had painted it on without deciding to. It is there in the reference photograph, and it is there on the canvas, small and hard and staining the plastic around it a dull rose, and I had put it in the way you put in a thing you have seen so many times you stop reading it. Which is the problem. Because that light is not the device watching. That light is the device asking for something.
Look at the web. It comes off the lower rim of the housing in a slack cone, catches once on nothing, and runs down to the moulding in a single strand that must be nearly a foot long. A spider has been living on this object undisturbed for a long season. It has anchored guy lines across the intake slots. No air is moving through that housing in any quantity worth measuring.
So the guardian above the bed has a blocked nose and a lit warning, and the person under the blankets has been sleeping beneath both for weeks.
I am not painting an accusation. The person is asleep, which is the correct thing to be doing at that hour, and the light is small, and the light is red, and red at night reads as normal to anybody who has ever owned a television. The whole design assumes somebody will notice. Nothing in the room is arranged so that anybody does.
Nine more paintings follow this one. In none of them does the disc detect anything.