Evolution's Ark II

The jars had nothing in them but tap water and food colouring. They shimmered seductively against a back wall – blue, green, yellow, red and orange – but that still didn't explain why people gravitated towards them, actually hovered around them, looking at one, and then another, and another ... the only explanation for that is the sheer power of the human imagination.

What the jars lacked in contents they made up for with labels that matter-of-factly identified non-existent objects, discovered and collected by non-existent scientists. Well, that's not entirely true. Some of the objects do indeed exist, just not in the jars in question; the scientists too were real people, just not scientists strictly speaking, but rather friends and relatives who had no idea we'd turned them into the discoverers of a rare species of bat or a distant black hole in the universe.

The people reading the labels didn't need much, a little coloured water and a few words, to set them wondering and thinking about the world. We still see it work from time to time. Many of those jars have been put to secondary uses around the Carton LeVert studio, even in our own kitchen, where every once in a while a guest will read a label and wonder why there are almonds in the jar labelled influenza virions from the 1918 pandemic.