Walking through the British Museum on a lunch break, I noticed dust settled inside some of the display cases. My job at that time was designing the digital interface to the museum's vast online collection of objects. I wondered if I was looking at a leak in the archive. Pieces of museum objects mixing with today's dust. I asked an archivist whether that dust might contain material from the objects themselves, mixed with contemporary particulate drifting in from outside. They

Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) scan of a paint fragment A fragment of paint lifted from the wall, magnified until it becomes terrain, then returned to the place it came from. The surface and its interior occupying the same coordinate. What appeared flat now holds ridges, fractures, crystalline architectures. Nothing was added. Nothing was discovered. The vastness was already there, compressed into the appearance of smoothness. The scan does not explain the wall. It does n