Empire (art)

Empire was a conceptual art film recorded by Andy Warhol in New York City, New York on the night of 25-26 July 1964 between 8:06 PM and 2:42 AM. The film, which was in black and white and had a run-time of approximately eight hours and five minutes, consisted entirely of a static shot of the Empire State Building, recorded from the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation on the first floor of the nearby Time-Life Building.

Bev Tarrant stole the film by destroying all copies of the film except one, erasing all references to it in computer databases and books that mentioned it, and wiping the memory of anyone other than her employer who knew about it. The theft took five years to complete. The film spent a couple of decades in private hands before the Universal Art Crime Division learned it was missing, tracked it down and liberated it. It eventually ended up in the Braxiatel Collection.

During the Deindum War, Bev watched the film to help her sleep, as she considered it the perfect cure for insomnia. The second time she watched it, however, it had changed and now showed the destruction of New York due to temporal interference by the Deindum. The third time she watched the film, it showed Bernice Summerfield preventing the Deindum from destroying New York. (PROSE: The Empire Variations)