On a monitor, mounted on a wall and turned on its side, an animated sequence shows a old-fashioned hotel sign, bolted to a brick wall, harshly lit by street lamps and neon glare.
The letters on the sign flip round and change to produce new combinations and slowly a story unfolds, told as one five-letter word or phrase at a time.
Poet Richard Price wrote the texts.
The piece is designed to be installed in a public space and to ‘perform’ its texts con¬tinuously, allowing a passing audience to give it as much or as little time as they choose, and rewarding prolonged attention with a constantly-shifting cycle of possible combinations. There are 12 separate “stanzas” - each a self-contained piece that begins and ends with the same image: the DVD is coded to pick the next stanza at random from the remaining 11 as each one finishes.
