‘The location of ‘The Window to Another Place’ should have been the tip-off that something wasn’t quite right with the installation, but the eccentricity of artists has muddled the weird and the mundane before. Those who discovered it initially in an otherwise unremarkable stretch of the Utah Badlands figured the rural placement and the stark contrast of wasteland and tech were clues to the piece’s subtext. What they believed that subtext was tended to be left unsaid.
‘The Window to Another Place’ looks much like any of the many camera/monitor combos that stream, in realtime, to a place across the globe where another identical set does the same in the opposite direction, allowing, say, passersby in Dublin to interact silently with tourists in New York. Many such projects exist and their whimsy relies entirely on the viewers’ understanding of just how far apart these visual portals are as well as a sure sense that whatever’s happening on the other side represents a slice of life equivalent, if not identical, to the one they are personally experiencing.
‘The Window to Another Place’ does none of these things. Not only doesn’t ‘The Window’ not specify its sister location, ‘Another Place’ looks similar to but unlike any place known to exist on Earth. Since this discovery, many have attempted to find ‘Another Place’ and all have failed. Similarly, all attempts to prove that ‘Another Place’ is a fictional, simulated environment created by and maintained by an internal computer have been inconclusive. ‘The Window’s’ casing, or its frame, has been breached twice by curious visitors, hoping to uncover a CPU capable of such a consistent, and yet unrepeating, trick, but both times ‘The Window’s’ internals have proven to be very simple. Perhaps too simple, even, to be accomplishing what the more traditional installations of this type do. Some rumors indicate that ‘The Window to Another Place’ has no external power source and that it emits no signals.
This would seem impossible.
The last tradition flouted by ‘The Window to Another Place’ is that the people walking by in ‘Another Place’ don’t seem to want to acknowledge that they are being watched.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes the people in ‘Another Place’ can’t help but look over out of the corners of their eyes and when they do they seem to grimace or startle and then they walk faster, careful not to look again.
Sometime in 2017 a sign appeared on ‘The Window to Another Place.’ It said: ‘Maybe we should just leave them be.’ The sign has become a fixture and several iterations have appeared as older versions have been lost to theft or weather. The message has found its way onto shirts and enamel mugs and even those clear plastic stickers for the back windows of cars but it doesn’t seem to be working.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
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