A downtown art installation that is meant to shine a light on Calgary’s history has gone dark.
Installed with a budget of $800,000 in 2017, the Calgary Scroll has been a key feature of the city’s 8 Street SW underpass revitalization project.
The public artwork aims to bring vibrancy to an urban underpass and is typically lit up with LED lighting, displaying scrolling messages that are text snippets of Calgary’s history from the last 100 years.
It wasn’t working as of Monday, and several residents tell CityNews it’s been many weeks since it was last operating normally. One Calgarian says he saw signs of issues even before the scroll screen went black, saying he passed by it a few times saw the “windows sign was on with the mouse cursor.”
The city says a software outage was first identified in early January.
Julie Yepishina-Geller is the city’s Public Art lead and says the Calgary Scroll being down is a result of a hardware malfunction and vandalism in the area.
She says while they are trying to replace the faulty hardware to revive the scroll, the city’s mobility team is also replacing vandalized glass panels at the 8 Street underpass later this week.
The City says it isn’t the first time that the Calgary Scroll has gone black.
“This is a regular part of infrastructure management,” reads a statement from Yepishina-Geller. “If a piece of art or infrastructure is down for an extended period of time, it is usually because it requires a more in-depth repair, such as a specialized part or service.”
The city expects the artwork to be back up and running again soon, but didn’t provide an exact timeline.