...is (when exhibited) a live stream from my studio in Montréal of a glass tray containing a photograph immersed in water. The left side of the interface holds two images of, respectively, the original manuscript for Baudelaire's "Spleen de Paris" and Proust's "A la Recherche de la Temps Perdue".

By clicking on the two gold rings (buttons below the video image) you are directly controlling a small robotic armature which shakes and collides two small glass vials that hover above the tray which contain bleach in one and blue dye in the other. Each screening, after someone has managed to finally jostle the vials into releasing one or the other fluid, the photo will be either partially eaten away (in the case of the bleach being spilled into the tray) or it will be tinted blue.

Like memory itself we see the past either through a kind of (metaphorical) bluish nostalgia such as when early cinematographers would tint film to emulate night, or enhance an image in a melancholic manner, like early postcards.

As you navigate the book interfaces you may play them like an instrument and trigger video from a database of 65 segments which were shot in and around the environs in which these two writers worked and lived.