Artefacts are ordinarily mere patients to historical agency, consequences of forces been and gone. Even in the contemporaneity of execution, the creative force stands apart from the thing created, a means divorced from its end. Yet a power is revealed only through its consequences, for what else could make it visible, tangible? Just as a living body is known only through a layer of dead skin, so a power is known only by its consequential envelope, a horizon of possibilities traced by past action.

Powers, then, are shrouded in darkness, never directly knowable, inferred from their agency — sometimes correctly, often not. Here we seek not only to give tangible body to power, but to capture it in an object, tying up cause and effect, agent and patient, force and consequence. We turn power onto itself, so it may be revealed in itself, and so it is no longer free to leave the object of its creation.

For that, dimly seen, is the human predicament, in the original sense of the term, still so elusive two millennia after its conception.

See Revelata, a collaboration between the (now disbanded) collective Milk & Steel and Ansuman Biswas, at Ministry of Nomads, 223-231 Old Marylebone Road, London NW1 5QT, from 18th October to 10 November 2013.