Obsessions – Public Work

September 29, 20080 Comments Tagged: Art, coins, design, Public Space, sagmeister

I stumbled across this really interesting example of experimentation in public space while browsing over at the Ministry of Type. Its a design put together in a public square somewhere in Europe (you can see a person there for scale). That would be kind of unremarkable just on its own, but the piece is put together using 250,000 Euro 1c coins.

Those responsible (including, somewhat unsurprisingly, Stefan Sagmeister) expected the work to be interacted with by people as the took coins, or simply moved them about. Apparently as one person was doing this, someone else reported them to the police for stealing it. The police decided it was in the best interests of everyone to "take" the piece for safekeeping.

There's a bunch of pictures on flickr to get the full impact of it all being put together. Its certainly an interesting concept, and was a lot of effort to put together.