After long negotiations and numerous bureaucratic obstacles, the artist was able to obtain laboratory mice. Freed from their involvement in science, they were relocated to a gallery where they were housed inside a glass terrarium with a running wheel connected to a music box. This running wheel played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake when the mice chose to use it. Based on a folktale in which a princess is turned into a swan, the ballet represents the metamorphosis undergone by the mice, who have transformed from powerless subjects of experimentation to artists in their own right. The mice exercise a certain authority over this venerated piece of music, determining when and for how long it will be played, as well as developing their own relationship to its sonic properties.
