Why is an ex-Pogues star living in a shed in an Oxford park? For the sake of his art . .

4.30am, 5 June 2005 I wake up freezing. I'm in a shed, in a park, in Oxford. Outside, in the mauve dawn, a spiral tower rises through river mist, a radio dish at its apex angled towards the sky, like a flower waiting for the sun.

8 October 2003 The start of a two-year spell as artist-in-residence to Oxford University's astrophysics department. Over the next few months, I felt my way into the life of the department, waiting for ideas to coalesce, following emerging threads of interest. I began to think about building a radio telescope, both as a sculpture and an exploration of the point at which invisible information becomes tangible.

Slowly my perspective changed. I wanted to regain a more tactile relationship with the physical world, one not mediated by a screen. Thinking about the universe and our place within it, I used to believe one had to stick one's head into space and look around. Gradually it dawned on me that one need look no further than the passage of shadows across a room, the slow spinning of the night sky around the axis of Polaris, the heat of the sun. Slow learner. I came to the astrophysics department to look into space and discovered the earth.

At some point it occurred to me to build the telescope as a union between an ancient observatory and a modern radio dish. Working outside allowed a direct connection between the telescope's location on earth and the universe at large. The tower spiralling up towards the cosmos, the bowl a passive focus, waiting for a particle, detected by a blip on a monitor, a burst of noise from a speaker, to fall. From this, new ideas and associations emerged, an expanding network of people, books, theories, histories, technology, architecture, language, the topology of the universe, the structure of reality . . . All these and more lie entwined within the resulting work, The Centre of the Universe.

16 May 2005 Flat-packed, the tower and dish arrive in a white transit van. They begin to take form, erected side by side.

27 May 2005 Following an aborted attempt to fix it on top of the tower, the dish sits on the ground, a head disconnected from its torso, a ruin, instant antiquity. A shed arrives, completing a line of geometric forms alongside the tower and dish.

3 June 2005 At the third attempt, the dish is fixed and the structure complete. The shed houses rudimentary electronic equipment to receive and decode signals from the dish.

11 June 2005 I've been living in the shed for more than a week now, sleeping under multiple layers. By day I open the shed to the public. Alongside the equipment is a small library: maps, drawings, chairs, a table. A mechanical pen records the peaks and troughs of the signals received from space, made audible through a pair of speakers. The message is hidden in the noise, an alien hand from the other side, struggling to make itself understood.

People come by. For some it's a chance encounter; others seek it out. Some stop and talk. Many seem shy to enter the shed, yet it's an integral part of the work. I like the idea that people will browse. The shed is littered with clues to the multiple strands woven into The Centre of the Universe. Reactions vary. Some people ask what it is; others tell me. I have no desire, though, to tell anyone a "truth". I am only interested in finding a thread, unpicking it, and watching a world unfold. Everyone creates the universe according to their own experiences and observations. Everyone, every point, is the centre.

For more information, visit www.cosmolog.org.uk

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