Firrell, one of Britain's most prolific public artists, was commissioned by the Mayor Of London's office to produce the work. The project was produced by Firma Arts & Media, under the technical direction of Kamal Ackerie. Ackerie has recently worked with Firrell on a projected installation work at Tate Britain which was a resounding success, and through which Firrell also realised the power and versatility of the medium of projection.
Firrell and Ackerie first scoured the Square for suitable surfaces and discovered the plinth casing the steps leading up to the entrance of the National Gallery. The Gallery is not part of the Square, so they had to get special permission to project onto and from their property, before which Firrell was also required to create mock-ups of the artwork he intended to use. This artwork had to physically fit the space and also into the overall curation of the festival's creative director Bradley Hemming.
He came up with a wish list comprising 38 sentences starting with the words "I want to live in a City . . .". The basic structure of the statements reflects how cities attract immigration, how that produces an energy, how the environment is in constant motion and how it's always aspiring to be better. He presented the texts, and everyone was very keen for the project to proceed, after which XL became involved.
The account was handled by XL director Des Fallon, assisted by Jo Beirne. They supplied two Barco R18 ELM Director machines, doubled up, using DVI signals from a Macintosh G5 server for the show, giving a pixel resolution of 1280 x 19024. The projectors were located 16m away from the wall on a special platform, and the final image was 6m wide. The show looped through the 38 pieces of text.
To morph between sentences Firrell used a series of animated red dots, which matched the banners hanging outside the gallery. "I wanted the process to be sympathetic with the building and to be graciously applied" he says. The installation ran from 10pm to midnight over two evenings and was a huge critical success.
(Lee Baldock)
