All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park Page A

row. In this way he created the overlapping zones of sound. The actual voice of the engineer, the complete narrative, was only audible from one place on the skywalk, high up in the guts of the first machine. But certain phrases followed you around the building.
    I thought, could you make stories, text, actual words, the way the blind engineer had manufactured sound? The museum occupies a complex of renovated brick buildings between the railroad tracks and a branch of the Hoosick River, the former site of the Arnold Print Works and subsequently Sprague Electric, which made capacitors and other components until the mid-1970s, when it moved its operations abroad. The museum makes much of its industrial past, and in the larger shows especially, you get the feeling of art being manufactured there in quantities suitable for distribution—an illusion, as it happens, because almost all of it is actually imported. Currently, in one of the long galleries, there is an exhibition of neon and ceramic sculpture from an artist’s cooperative in Singapore.
    Since the late 1980s, the galleries have spread through the abandoned factory. Stephen’s sound installation coincided with the public opening of the old boiler house. In a sense, the gallery was renovated with the art already inside, three levels of encrusted generators, open to the weather, left to rust for many years. They had provided steam to the entire complex, according to the following process: trains delivered crushed coal to the siding, and a miniature bulldozer pushed it onto the conveyer belt to the top of the building. Then there was an enormous system of hoppers and chutes that fed it into the three furnaces, missing now, and the squid-like boilers.
    But frankly, I didn’t understand how any of this had worked. Nor was I interested. Instead, I had wanted to construct something of my own, a device made up of three interchangeable parts. I wanted to use it to provide power. First, I imagined the human body as a series of interconnected machines, taking on fuel and excreting waste, producing heat, producing motion, until they gradually fell silent one by one. This particular complex had operated every day during the course of an ordinary lifetime—my mother’s for example. It had come on line when she was just a girl.
    Second (and this was more of an overlay than a separate idea), I imagined a brain in the same terms, a brain that might produce or combine thoughts, or even make outlandish comparisons of entirely separate phenomena. Inevitably there would be inefficiencies and waste.
    Third, I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some deliberate redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.
    One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine. Another question: Was there always in all cases a hidden, secret process, as there had been at the Sprague plant during the war?
    As I stood on a metal bridge over the Hoosick River during the opening of the installation last September, I wondered how I could test these functions. I listened to the words that I had written months before, misremembered now, distorted and recombined with other sounds: a low din that issued from the plant and spread into the outside air. Stephen Vitiello had worked with the illusion that the noise of the installation came from the machines themselves, as if their dead, frozen valves and pistons were still active in some vestigial or internal way, operating at reduced capacity. From my vantage point I tried to spread the illusion outward—first words, then recorded sounds that