Why

I had some spare paving slabs and I thought installing them on the field would be unusual and interesting. The Biohazard symbol is quite alarming and inconsistent with a playing field and that was probably about all there was in choosing that. I also thought that a message should be included to add some level of intrigue. Something that would at least require a BIT of thinking about. So I used the simplest A=1. B=2 code and would paint on “U-RINGPIECE”. It would serve to unfairly reward anyone bothering to work it out with a bit on an insult. I also thought that hiding some secret-looking documents underneath would be a good Easter-egg for whoever would be responsible for the inevitable removal or destruction of the slabs. The documents were purportedly from Defra, and included some images of cells and some sort of document that I’d redacted to make it unclear what it was originally about but with bits and pieces that sounded worrying or something. There was also an obsolete data disc format with a government Most Secret label on it and an aerial map and some other map in German relating to Echelon, which is a surveillance program primarily operated by the United States.

When

July 2007.

Where

On the playing field opposite my house

Materials / Media

Concrete slabs, different paints

Production/
Execution

Quite a lengthy process. I decided I would get a better result from geometrically constructing the design rather than just creating a stencil for it. So that meant working out a whole bunch of centre points and diameters to draw on the slabs with a large compass. quite a lot of hours were thrown at it in various ways.

Execution

I had to dig out a patch of turf so the slabs would be flush with the surface of the field. That’s always more time consuming than expected with adjustments. Before leaving the slabs in their final position, I also placed the fake redacted documents in a clear sealed plastic sleeve underneath them.

Notes

It was fun to see people look at and ponder over what it was all about.

Duration & Fate

It didn’t take too long before the local kids tore up the slabs, scattered them nearby and broke them up as much as they could be arsed to. after each time it happened I would puzzle over putting the fragments back in place correctly and it was increasingly difficult.

It was faded and fragmented and some parts missing by March 2014. It was dispersed and lost forever not long after that. In August 2019 I found one painted fragment embedded in a different part of the field about 20 metres away.