Firrell corresponded with a number of the original members of the US counter culture movement. The artist was particularly interested in eye-witness accounts of the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon.

His research was inspired initially by a small button badge from the Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, publicising the levitation of the Pentagon planned for 21 october '67.

In the artist’s own words: ‘This little button badge was the first reference I encountered to the levitation of the Pentagon. I didn’t realise this was a canonical happening in the American hippy movement until I started corresponding with Jo Freeman. Jo was a student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s and she was active in organisations working for civil liberties and the civil rights movement. She was also an early organiser of the women’s liberation movement.

'I also corresponded with Judy Gumbo and Nancy Kurshan, founder members of the anti-war group the Youth International Party or Yippies. In 1972, the FBI described Judy as ‘the most vicious, the most anti-American, the most anti- establishment, and the most dangerous to the internal security of the United States.’ Both Judy and Nancy were involved with the mobe (National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), the organisers of the 1967 anti-war demonstration and levitation of the Pentagon.’

The mobe planned a rally at West Potomac Park near the Lincoln memorial to be followed by a march to the Pentagon where another rally would be held in a parking lot, followed by civil disobedience on the steps of the Pentagon itself.

Jerry Rubin, who had led a large and successful Vietnam day committee at the University of California, Berkeley, was responsible for organising the action. The initial Washington DC rally included a concert performance from counter culture folk singer Phil Ochs and drew approximately 70,000 people to the Lincoln memorial. Around 50,000 of those were then led by social activist Abbie Hoffman from the memorial to the Pentagon in nearby Arlington, Virginia. Around 650 people, including novelist Norman Mailer, were arrested for civil disobedience on the steps of the pentagon.

The levitation was led by the poets Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders, and the activists Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They meditated and chanted to raise up the Pentagon and ‘exorcise the evil within’. Allen Ginsberg described the levitation as a ‘happening’ that ‘undermined, psychologically, the authority of the Pentagon’.

These events captured the artist’s imagination, as did the little graphic world of the button badge. ‘The series needed a central, cohering visual theme and I felt this little badge was it - a graphical ‘window’ onto those events.

quotes visually from button badge and re-expresses the anti-militarist position that war is both immoral and ineffective.

'When I asked Judy if the Pentagon had actually levitated, she told me Abbie Hoffman and her activist husband Stew Albert said the Pentagon rose between 6 or 3 feet off the ground. ‘I believed them,’ she wrote to me. ‘Why not?’

The text first appeared in the artist's projection 2009, at The Guards' Chapel, Birdcage Walk, London UK when Firrell was Artist in Residence with the Household Division of the British Army.

It is a quote from a conversation between the artist and philosopher A.C. Grayling and the full text reads:

Work was originally developed as one of a series of prototypes constituting a 'War Series'. In the end the artist abandoned the focus on war concluding it was preferable to starve the subject of oxygen.