Interviewer: The work has been installed at a number of places throughout the world such as the Venice Biennale and the Laforet Museum
in Tokyo. What were the main considerations behind the Sydney Opera House installation compared to the other sites?
Nick Robertson: Because the piece is made onsite by the venue it tends to be done in a different way by every technical team that puts it
together. The way it was produced here was absolutely unique. I’ve never seen it before, and it was a really clever way of
doing it, in that the wall was built on the ground and then hoisted into place. The wall has got a metal framework behind
it and flats on it and the monitors are secured to the metal framework. We’ve had all sorts of ways of doing it. We’ve had
huge wooden structures built to hang it on. And it really comes down to the technical ideas of the people at the venue. The
particular considerations for this venue were obviously the shape of the room. It’s a completely square room in plan, so we
had to think about how the rest of the space is used. The Venice Biennale was an odd one because it was in a space that was
as unlike a gallery as it’s possible to be. It was in an old oil drum warehouse at the Arsenale in Venice. But that gave it
a really odd feel, something that’s very different from a space like this, which is also unlike any other space. This feels
theatrical to me and we had to play to that sense of theatricality. With the Venice [exhibition], it almost ended up looking
like a church. It was as if this thing had landed from outer space and it did have a more church-like feel. We did one in
Naples for instance that was at the end of a nine hundred metre Roman corridor and so you’d walk down this corridor and you’d
see a little speck of light in the distance and as you got closer you’d see it was a configuration of monitors and that was
a very different experience from walking straight into a room and seeing it there. So, we design each exhibition to suit the
surrounding it’s going to sit in.
