Paper storm.

If you were given an empty room the size of a football field and asked to fill it with art, what would you put in it? That was the assignment the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Mass., gave to Ann Hamilton.

Hamilton. an artist from Ohio, covered the 3,380 windowpanes with hot-pink silk cloth and installed 40 paper-dropping machines and 24 cone-shaped sound speakers on the ceiling. Then, with the help of 45 people, $100,000, and millions of sheets of 8- by 11-inch onionskin paper, she created a paper storm.

The result: an exhibit named "Corpus." Taken from the Latin corpora, meaning body, the plural noun corpus can also refer to a collection of works by an author or artist.

At first glance, "Corpus" might look like a huge, empty space filled with litter. But walk in and you will find a rose-colored room that feels like winter and fall all at once--sheets of translucent paper flutter down like giant snowflakes and crunch like dry leaves under your feet. Meanwhile, through speakers mounted to the ceiling, the hypnotic sound of hushed voices fills the space with poetry.

The exhibit, which Hamilton has called "the nothing that is something," opened in April and will run through October 17 www.massmoca.org