Walter Askin: I started to work with the same sort of forms over and over again. That's pretty normal for people to experiment for a while and then start to land on something that's satisfying for a period of time. And so I created these in decals in four different color groups in positives and reverses, and then mounted them on plexiglass. Some of these were shown back in the Whitney, and then in boxes with showcase bulbs down at the bottom.

The wonderful thing about being here in Southern California is it's the world's greatest hardware store, and there's everything you want here, and there's Caltech here too. So if I'd just done this and put the showcase bulb in and let it go and run, it would've warped all of the plexiglass. But I just went to a couple of people over there and they worked out a couple of tubes. One that cools off, while the other heats up, and it goes on and off every two and one quarter minutes, which turns out to be the exact amount of time it takes for a brigand who wants to rob your house, decide to break in. So there are people who own those in San Francisco who turn them on when they go out at night, because just when the fella says, "I'm going to break into that house," the light goes on.