One fine day in the middle of the night we received a visitation from Alfred Jarry. He tied his bicycle to the railings and knocked on the bottom of our door. We offered him a green tea, which he drank but said he deplored as an affront to the colour green. Once he had settled down he said he had come with a message for us, he said it was of the utmost importance and we should attend to it straight away. 

He informed us that he had been tipped off that we had ‘a beige square’ filed away in the IPCRES vaults, and that this artefact, which had been imagined by the people, should be located and reverse-engineered to reveal its true purpose. It was said to have the words ‘historical material’ on one and all of its sides, visible from all aspects. On inspection we found that we did indeed hold the artefact although we had no recollection of acquiring it. It was indeed a small beige square, which in certain lights gave off the appearance of being almost nothing, a flat plane, and a three-dimensional cube; at the same time [!] simultaneously, and as a coexistent concept. At this point Jarry laughed hysterically, got back on his bike and cycled away into the bright night. 

We looked at it from all sides, if this is possible with a flat projection, and concluded that the purpose of this beige square was as a prototype event intended as an archetype of events yet to come, and similar in kind to those that can now be seen in art galleries across the nation. The great big gallery in London is atypical of such evental-sites, we might call them eventual sights, where indeed nothing can be seen but place.

Troubled by the phenomenon of such homogenous soft thought that merely invites analogies of once pleasant memories, Jarry had tasked IPCRES to look into the crypt of the small beige square. We imagined that hidden in the oscillations between the illusory sense of a co-existent flat beige plane and a small beige cube were other co-existent potentialities awaiting the imaginative mind. The beige square cube contained potentially as many imaginary solutions to our collective problems as spokes on Jarry’s bicycle, or maybe more. These imaginary solutions could perhaps be unfurled like a fan, revealing multiple properties of serial superposition. We stood back (Jarry had suggested that as a good idea). 

His next instruction that was received by telephone was that we should position the small beige square in one of the large art ‘tanks’ in central London in order that its superpositions may be plotted. This was the hypothesis at least. Set amongst the other events that can often be found in the tanks the IPCRES beige event would not look out of place. People might enjoy its playfulness, reminded perhaps of previous events that soft thought had been bounced off. We thought its perceived one-dimensionality would thrill the public participants and many would find it charming and worthy of its catalogued place. That was the plan.

It would be disguised as an ‘eventual sight’ and so be firmly located in its place. The task of participants to surreptitiously apply convoluted thought to the small beige square, having discovered it hidden it in the plain light of day under the unforgivable artificial lights. This activating process might perhaps set in motion the true purpose of the beige square. Jarry suspected the beige illusion was like a screen (he knew nothing of screens) that both concealed and projected simultaneously, and hoped it may reveal itself to those of an experimental inclination. We believe subsequently, along with Jarry that this beige square, this illusory event object is a truly explosive device, containing as it does a dialectical image that flashes unseen and intermittently, on an eternal countdown.

Our best wager is that the small beige square consists of a series of co-existent events, some green, that will happen all at once in situ as they will happen in the future and as they have always happened. The people however will be left as usual to bet on whether anything ever happened at all, and perhaps even in the regulated and conditioned air of the large art tank it may never happen. We considered whether the small beige square should remain resolutely within the IPCRES vault as an art form yet to come, awaiting the idle and dispassionate request of the uninformed. It hardly seems fair to set such a trap in such an unassuming place. We will give it some thought before we give up, as after all no enigma is solved so well that its status as an enigma ceases to exist. Any solution is infinitely imaginary. 

We have since heard that Jarry has got an e-mail account so we await instruction.

An undefined duration later this mail arrived into the IPCRES account:

To understand on behalf of truth is to be reactive, accepting the world of the as is, but to misunderstand on behalf of error is to be creative, inventing the world of the as if.

We await another visitation having procured a libation that might be more to his taste.