Everywhere there are corners, nooks and crannies, blurred margins of attention, where technological installations are leading an unnoticed yet effectual existence. To these places art should withdraw, into there it should penetrate. Like a secret agent, art would have to sneak into the taciturn world of boxes, sockets and switches, of automatic door mechanisms, remote control and alarm systems. Art would have to do mimicry and become similar to fire extinguishers and emergency lightings, control instruments and temperature sensors, smoke detectors and fire alarms, scent dispensers, loudspeakers and time switches. Like junction boxes and control devices, it would have to be grey or white, soundless and inconspicuous, neutral like its technological relatives and the places where they are hanging, sticking and clinging. It would have to be similar to what the mistletoe above the door, the bunch of garlic in the window frame used to be of old. It would be a mute witness. But like its technological and magical cousins, busily engaged in obscurity on a commission by persons unknown. It would be of a power both reassuring and disconcerting. It would be due to its inscrutable connections to something or somebody, maintained clandestinely. Ubiquitously, it would see and hear, smell, record, forward, disconnect or connect. Like the tidy bunch of its relations it would simply be there, nobody knowing what it actually does and whether it does it at all, no one really suspecting whose agent it is, who placed it in its obscure position and for what reason. It would simply be there. Openly concealed from innocent glances.
R.S. 1987