Francis Alys is an artist who has intrigues me for some time, particularly since I studied his work When Faith Moves Mountains in depth for my dissertation. I was interested in whether the word ‘immersive’ could be used to describe the experience of this piece; immersion as an act of labour and how this experience changes when brought back into the gallery. I found out recently however, that Alys was also the artist behind another work, Nightwatch. This capitalises on the CCTV system in the National Portrait Gallery to film a fox released into the space. I have long been fascinated by pre-conditioning, by subconscious conventions that make people move and interact with works in a certain way. The strange interaction that the fox has with the institutionalised gallery space highlights subconscious preconditioning. The fox keeps to the edges of the room, branching into the centre to move around obstacles, as if aware on some level of being watched or followed. Humans too move in a different, yet equally systematic route through the gallery space. With the fox it is an instinctive natural urge to avoid danger, with a human however it is not a natural instinct but a convention built into their subconscious over time. The work presents an interesting parallel where nature and nurture have come to produce the same response.