1. Pictura rescripta
Wall of Portuguese azulejos in color electronic paper, with emblem figures swapped in front of the viewer
A wall of blue-and-white Portuguese tiles whose figures do not stay put. Behind a ceramic grid, four electronic-paper panels display scenes from Otto van Veen's Emblemata Horatiana (Antwerp, 1607). When someone stops in front of the wall, one figure is slowly replaced by another, and the emblem no longer means what it did.
Pictura rescripta is a wall of 48 Portuguese azulejos in an 8 × 6 grid, roughly 119 × 84 cm. It is built from four color electronic-paper panels mounted behind a real ceramic tile grid, grout and all. Nothing on the wall emits light; like ordinary tile, it is visible only in the light of the room. The scenes are rendered in the blue and white of classical Portuguese tilework and come from the emblems in Otto van Veen’s book. The book, later published in Spanish as Theatro Moral, supplied moral scenes for tile panels throughout the Portuguese world. The key example is the cloister of the Convent of São Francisco in Salvador, Bahia, where 37 panels installed between 1746 and 1748 show emblems selected from the book’s 103 images. Which edition the friars worked from cannot be determined.
Each change swaps a complete figure, such as a person, an object, or a piece of scenery, and every figure occupies whole tiles. Electronic paper redraws slowly. The work makes use of that delay instead of hiding it: for eighteen seconds or so the old figure gives way to the new one, and the viewer watches the entire transition.