Entering the Miller Gallery, this was the first artwork, the most attention-grabbing, captivating thing present (right after greeting the gallery receptionist/caretaker).  I visited the whole of the gallery that day, but I just had to return to this one. 

The inner first floor was dark, so the moving flames instantly took the limelight. Initial impressions were overwhelming curiosity and amusement. Clearly something was going on with this exhibition - it wasn't just some idle or unresponsive, flat piece hung on the wall - it was a moving, curated installation seemingly with some special purpose. There was a low, rhythmic sound coming from the installation, and this was especially exciting and intriguing to me. I eventually realised that the sound could be heard most clearly from the glass apparatus, as you can see in the right of the picture above.

There were actually two sets of the installation - two lit lamps, and two glass apparatuses hung from above by red material. The other glass apparatus, not pictured above, was set at a higher level, almost out of my ear's reach. I amused myself tiptoeing at one apparatus and then sidling to the lower one to catch the different rhythmic sounds coming from each.

The kind receptionist/caretaker sitting right next to the installment was kind enough to explain the art piece after a while. The reverberating sound occurring every so often begun to sound like a heartbeat, and I had become most inquisitive. She explained to me that computer-generated bass sounds were being fed into the black tubes, and then travelled through the yellow tubes to the flame, causing the flame to dance about erratically.

Another curious thing I noted was how the flame seemed to split into two prongs. At first, it looked like the second, less prominent prong might actually be a reflection of the first prong in the glass, but then the two prongs would occasionally dance in opposite directions, and I realised that this could not be the case if one were actually a reflection of the other. This seemed to be true for both the setups.

It had been observed that flames would move according to ambient sound, and Demarinis made chief use of this observation in this artwork. The observation was first made, apparently, while in some church while a choir was proceeding - or so I was told. When it's really quiet, a particularly low humming (like the one you can hear while in an airplane) can be heard. Unfortunately, the heater was on, so I wasn't able to hear this. 

Apparently, the receptionist/caretaker was sitting there on the first floor in case of the museum catching fire due to that particular artwork. She had more to say about it, as well: the spinning mirrors behind the lamps were supposed to capture the moment as the flame danced to the rhythms, apparently. I found the mirrors to spin rather too fast for them to be of much use or interest in that sense, but staring at the flame directly allowed me to see that at each "heartbeat" of the sounds, the flame would shoot up ever so slightly as though bouncing to the beat.