A woman sings The Show Must Go On, and the field goes up.
In an abandoned agricultural field, a second and orderly field stands: twenty-two white helium balloons tethered to the ground with wire and held down by concrete weights. A woman stands among them and sings. Her voice cannot be heard. Condenser microphones take it, and a vocoder translates her singing into frequencies resembling a swarm of desert locusts — the translation triggered by the words that end in the letter s. Those frequencies gather into a whispering symphony which, through a coded array, fires the ignition that releases the balloons into the sky. The same ignition that frees them burns them, so their purpose is never fulfilled, and the sound of the explosions joins the symphony.
In the gallery the video plays from several angles at once, so the apparatus running between the field and the sky is disclosed rather than hidden. Beside it hangs a mobile-like array of fluorescent tubes, disconnected from any electricity. As in the field, they ignite without contact — struck by current bursting from a Tesla coil like lightning out of the sky. The frequencies the desert locust produces are identical to those produced by the coils and the tubes, and together they play live, an accompaniment to the symphony in the video. Neither requires a visitor to continue.