Beware of Pickpockets

Starting point. A station announcement, bilingual: a three-note chime, then a man's voice in French — "pickpockets may be present in the station or on board the trains" — then a woman's voice in Japanese.

Two fragments, not one. Each voice is read separately. This is the only work in the collection resting on two executions of the same recording.

Codex applied. The Form Codex for Field Material, version 1.0. Each voice yields two curves of unequal amplitude — one slight, one strong. Set together, the two curves of a single voice draw a moon, a half-oval: that is the profile of that voice.

From profile to volume. Two voices, two moons. Set together, they sweep a volume — an elongated quarter of an orange, whose ridge is where the two profiles meet. Nothing in the rule says they must be joined that way; that is the decision, and it is taken.

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. The gap between what was prescribed and what was carved belongs to the work.