The door opened with a small click. He groped along the wall until he found the light switch. Making sure to lock the door behind him first of all, he took off his cap and sweater, put his bag down on the floor, then proceeded to pace up and down the narrow studio corridor for a while, his hands over his mouth, before finally slumping down in front of the computer and putting his head in his hands.

He opened his bag and got out the program, his sketchbook and master tape. On that tape, which was labeled with his name, address and phone number, were the originals of every video work he’d made over the past ten years or so. It had already been two years since he’d last stored a new work on the tape. Not that two years was considered terminal as far as fallow periods went, but it was still long enough to make him anxious.

He opened the sketchbook. The drawings filled scores of pages and, despite being based on fundamentally the same idea, were completely different from the performance poster in terms of atmosphere and artistic feel. The naked bodies of the men and women were brilliantly decorated, covered all over in painted flowers, and there was something simple and straightforward about the ways in which they were having sex. Without the taut buttocks, tensed inner thighs, and the skinny upper bodies that gave them a dancer’s physique, there would have been no more suggestiveness about them than there was with spring flowers. Their bodies—he hadn’t drawn in faces—had a stillness and solidity that counterbalanced the arousing nature of the situation.

The image had come to him in a flash of inspiration. It had happened last winter, when he’d started to believe that he might somehow be able to bring his two-year-long fallow period to an end, when he’d felt energy start to wriggle up from the pit of his stomach, bit by bit. But how could he have known this energy would coalesce into such a preposterous image? For one thing, up until then his work had always tended toward realism. And so, for someone who had previously worked on 3D graphics of people worn down by the vicissitudes of late capitalist society, to be screened as factual documentaries, the carnality, the pure sensuality of this image, was nothing short of monstrous.