Artist fears Lansdowne installation may become '$2 million of scrap metal'

The "Moving Surfaces" art installation at Lansdowne Park as it appeared on Friday, Oct. 31, 2025. Photo by JULIE OLIVER /POSTMEDIA

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The final Lansdowne 2.0 report has recommended that a massive digital art piece be “respectfully decommissioned and removed” after only 11 years.

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Moving Surfaces is 10 metres by 50 metres of undulating folded stainless steel with an LED lighting system that activates at night. But it has been non-functional as a digital art piece since March 2024 because some parts are no longer available and there’s no budget to restore the piece, the report said.

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Moving Surfaces’ Vancouver-based creator, Jill Anholt, is asking city councillors to reconsider and says she and her team would like to come up with a cost-effective solution.

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If Moving Surfaces is decommissioned, it will represent “almost $2 million of stainless steel to be sold for scrap,” she said.

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“It would be fiscally and culturally irresponsible to dismantle and discard the work. Not to mention a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.”

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In the past 10 years, the city has frequently had cases of LED strings not lighting up and has had to repair these by replacing the LED power supplies. Moving Surfaces has served as a “meaningful element within the public realm,” but it has required maintenance over the years. It would take $700,000 to rehabilitate the lighting system, according to the report.

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“It is estimated that it has cost $5,000 annually since 2017 to maintain, replace and solve electrical issues. In 2019, due to a major lighting and software failure, a repair was required to make the Moving Surfaces functional. The cost to refurbish was $119,000.”

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The installation is a “unique civic asset” and one of the largest public art projects in Canada, Anholt said.

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When it was first activated, Moving Surfaces showed images created by Anholt based on a journey along the Rideau Canal. But one of the installation’s most innovative features is its ability to show dynamic digital art by artists from around the world, Anholt said. To her knowledge, the work of only one other digital artist besides herself has been showcased on Moving Surfaces.

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“This is a complex piece that was never fully realized.”

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Anholt considers $5,000 a year to be a modest annual maintenance fee for a light-based large scale public artwork operating continuously in the open air. All public art using advanced lighting systems needs maintenance, she said.

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“I suspect that the LED screens in the stadium and their proposed arena will have maintenance budgets that far exceed this amount,” she told city councillors.