A picture that can only change by turning over
move across the wall and its glints move with you · click and a ring of tiles turns over to gold and back · drag to brush a stroke of gold the picture mends behind you · hold still and the tiles around your hand lift off to circle it · fling and the whole wall takes flight · click the flock and a wave of gold runs through it
A wall of glass and gold tesserae, each set by hand a few degrees off true, so that a lamp carried past sets the whole wall glittering. It opens on a masterpiece, drawn anew and laid the way it was made: Van Gogh's The Starry Night, every tile set along a brushstroke, coiling into the whorls and circling each star; or Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, every tile set along the water, climbing the wave and curling over into its claws of foam; or Monet's The Houses of Parliament, the palace standing dark in the fog with the sun coming through behind its towers, every tile set level along the river, climbing the towers and ringing the sun, and while it stands, as in Monet's series, the fog turns over to a sunset. Then, out of the whorls, the curl or the sun, every tile where the painting has detail snaps into four, and the quarters turn over to paint it finer. Stay, and the wall comes round to the next painting. Every tile has two faces, and neither ever changes colour where you can see it: to change, a tile turns over, and shows what was painted on its hidden side. So the pictures on this wall move by turning — the painting, a bowl of fruit after Cézanne that does not stay fruit for long, a sea at dusk with a boat crossing it, koi circling under lily pads, a vault of gold stars about a cross — and when the hour changes, dusk to night or blue to gold, the change runs across the wall as a front, tile after tile. Every minute or so the whole wall lifts off, peeling away from one edge (the Great Wave breaks, bursting out of its curl), and wheels overhead as a flock with bands of gold rolling through it, before it comes down as the next picture, laid a new way: in a grid, in courses, in rings, in brushstrokes. Move across the wall and its glints move with you. Tap it and a ring of tiles turns over to gold and back; drag across it and a stroke of gold follows your hand, which the picture mends behind you; hold still and the tiles around your hand peel off and circle it, and come home when you let go; fling it and the whole wall takes flight. Tap the flock and a wave of gold runs through it.