Every word of the three volumes has been taken out. What is left is the punctuation, laid down in reading order and painted as a sea, after Turner's Slave Ship (1840). Volume I, production, is the sky. Volume II, circulation, is where the water starts. Volume III, the process as a whole, is the deep.
From a distance it reads as wealth, one surface, an "immense accumulation of commodities." Come closer and the currents settle into marks, and the marks into the order in which Marx wrote them. Stay still and the words that were taken out come back up through the water.
The pale lights are quotation marks. In Capital these are the places where other people speak: factory inspectors, physicians, and the children who worked through the night, in their own words, in Marx's footnotes. Touch one.
The painting lives on attention. It is lifeless until someone looks at it. Every mark your pointer crosses is taken in and turns red, the only red in the picture, and the time you spend is counted. The red does not last. It sinks back into the grey within a minute, the way living labour becomes dead labour inside capital. Leave, and the whole painting drains.
Or strike. Withdraw your labour and your traces and time are taken back, and for a while the painting has nothing to live on.
Press ≋ in the corner to take the painting apart: the ground, the marks, the voices, the ghosts.