Bateaux Mouche

Starting point. Two minutes and seventeen seconds taken at the thirty-eighth minute of a long take aboard a bateau-mouche. The tour commentary runs through five languages — Spanish, English, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin — over a continuous engine: the Seine as the main artery of Paris, river traffic declining from 1905 as the metro gains ground, the service revived in 1949, the sea three hundred and fifty kilometres away by the Normandy valley. Then the passage under a bridge, whose reverberation swallows everything, the exit, and the voice stopping.

Codex applied. The Form Codex for Field Material, version 1.0, in five segments. The rule names a shape only if its amplitude clears the segment's own noise. Here it names one, the last, a bowl: the four others hold their level inside their own noise.

What the reading keeps. The rule always writes the curvature, even where it declines to read it. All five segments are therefore taken by their curvature: two pronounced — a bowl and a bell — and three of lesser slope. Taking the curvature below the noise floor is a decision; it belongs to the work and not to the rule.

From profile to volume. The two pronounced curves, one set beneath the other, form the eye. The three others become the three edges of an inverted pyramid carrying the blade down to the base, one more curved than the other two.

What the work is. A sculpture has no time in which to sound; what enters it is a profile, not a sequence of events. The rule is instituted between two domains that nothing brings together, and executed to the end. What the rule names and what the sculpture takes up do not coincide: that gap belongs to the work.