Given the Materials at Hand confronts viewers/listeners with three elements, each of which interferes with the other two. First, the sound is only coming from behind the viewer who (visually) attends to the panels and the text painted on them in black. Second, the text appears meaningless (devoid of content), but in consideration of its repetitious presentation/variation across the six panels, suggests pattern (though it is a pattern that is not obvious). Third, the panels themselves might initially appear as though they are traditional art-objects, perhaps with a canvas surface, while closer inspection reveals that they are not; being made of acoustically absorptive material covered in a thin, breathable fabric, the panels appear to have been intended to oppose the sound.

The text was generated algorithmically by applying the mathematical permutation that describes the word repetition pattern of a Sestina to sequential sets of six words, and then interlacing the sets according to a different offset factor for each panel. The algorithm is cyclical; when the permutation is applied to panel six (the panel that is semantically intelligible) the text for panel one (first on the left) is produced.