In August 2007 I participated in the performance in public space festival ‘Out of Site’, in Dublin. Michelle Browne, the curator of the festival, asked me to develop a work for the site of Mountjoy Prison, which is soon to be relocated from the city centre to the suburbs.

Working with this ’site’ what most intrigued me was how the experience of being in prison would affect your notion of time. Most people have experienced the elasticity of time (generally it passes slowly when you don’t want it to) but how would this be in prison, where the time spans are often long and the distractions few?

Initially I thought about trying represent the passing of time, to make time visible, by marking out the seconds, minutes and hours of the day with chalk on a wall. However, after some logistical issues, I moved on to the idea of making time audible, speaking the seconds, minutes and hours of the day through a megaphone. To try and illustrate the difference between perceived and actual time, I would say the time I thought it was, rather than looking at a watch.

For three days of the festival I told the time through a megaphone from 9 in the morning until 5 in the evening (with an hour lunch break). After the first few hours I had to stop saying the seconds. It was incredibly painful, but more importantly I could not stop to talk to passers-by who asked what I was doing.

In fact, as if often the case, it was the peripheral conversations that happened around the piece that were the most interesting. In terms of representing the difference between perceived and actual time, I would say the performance was fairly disastrous. But, as a provocation, a means to stimulate some kind of dialogue in public space, then it was marginally successful..