Numbered, weighed and found wanting.
Blinded by his unbounded power, Babylonian King Belshazzar hosted a great feast. At the height of the gala celebration, he commanded that the gold and silver vessels stolen from the Jewish Temple be brought forth so the revelers could drink from them in honor of Baal, the god of Babylon.
No sooner were they desecrated, a disembodied hand appeared and wrote the following words in flaming letters on the palace wall: Mene, Mene, Tekel, upharsin.
Thus began the downfall of Babylon.
The decommissioned postal service logistics center’s spiral packet chutes—custom-made for the facility in the 1980s—invite festivalgoers to decipher the mysterious inscription. The construction—made to vibrate in its distinctive resonance—sorts materials hidden beneath the skin of their packaging, packets encircling the globe millions of times daily.
And once again we pay homage to the gods of consumption.
The results of this acquisitive frenzy are spewed out by the spiral packet chutes, and festivalgoers can number and weigh them for themselves and perhaps find them wanting.
