On a regular morning, at quarter to ten, a museum guard arrives at the second floor of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She leaves her small bag on the chair facing the exhibition room and walks into the space of One Candle. The room is dark. From underneath one of the projectors, she takes the matches and turns to the candle at the farthest end of the small triangular room. In one movement she lights the candle. The room is suddenly illuminated by images of a single burning candle; the flickering flame being projected by a video camera onto the walls in three different colours. The guard looks at the projections on the walls; she inspects the position of the video camera and lowers the candle in its tripod. Then she wipes some candle wax off the floor. And after deciding that all looks well, she takes her seat to await the first museum visitor. [figure 4]

This small routine is repeated every morning at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main (hereafter referred to as MMK). Before visitors enter the museum, One Candle is prepared for its display. The cathode ray projectors are turned on and the candle is lit. One Candle by Korean artist Nam June Paik (1932–2006) is a closed-circuit installation consisting of a burning candle filmed by a video camera and projected on the walls by several divergent cathode ray projectors. The work was first installed in 1988 at Portikus, a gallery space devoted to contemporary art in Frankfurt. In 1991, the year that the museum opened its doors, the work entered the collection of the MMK. [figure 5]

Since its acquisition, One Candle has been on display almost permanently in the same triangular room. Right from the start, however, the MMK was challenged by the obsolescence and malfunctioning of the cathode ray tube projectors used in this work. In fact, after five years — in 1996 — the entire set of projectors was replaced by a new set of contemporary rary cathode ray projectors. [figure 6] Over the last few years these new projectors have also required maintenance: tubes have been replaced and several other repairs have been carried out.