"The enormous room - 90 feet long, 30 feet wide, and 22 feet high - echoed with the sounds of footsteps, the floor itself a sound box constructed of steel sheets, each of them 4-by-8-foot rectangles, over a wooden structure over existing carpet. At the same time, muffling and absorbing the sound was a wall densely stacked with 35,000 disused patent books, vertically arranged and mutually dependent, the weight of each pressing down on the one below, which was supporting the one above. Horizontally interspersed among them were dummies of the type used in Greek wrestling. Each of these dummies had been hand sewn and stuffed with sawdust."

"Visitors entering the room came up behind an attendant working at a table. Using wet-dry sandpaper, she was rubbing the silver backing off of a set of square mirrors, thereby erasing a circular space in the middle and turning the mirrors to windows of clear glass. As the mirror-glass clearings were finished, they were placed on the table, accumulating there during the approximately six-week run of the show."

"The silvered 'ereasures' were left as accumulations on the table. A second chair on the opposite side of the table allowed the visitorto take up a place across from the attendant."

- Joan Simon, Ann Hamilton. 2002. Published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York, NY.

Photo credits: Charles Mayer