The Fourth Plinth is the name given to the empty plinth in the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square in London. It was originally designed by Sir Charles Barry and built in 1841 to display an equestrian statue. There were not enough funds available at the time to create a statue and so the plinth was sometimes referred to as the 'empty plinth'.

Over recent years it has been home to a number of temporary works of art. From 4th July to 14th October this year, the 'artwork' is One & Other by Anthony Gormley (the sculptor responsible for Angel of the North (big steel angel statue in Gateshead) and Another Place (life-size statues looking out to sea on Crosby Beach).

One & Other is completely different. On the hour, each hour, over the 100 days, a different person will be lifted onto the plinth by a JCB Loadall with a specially designed cherrypicker basket - so over the course of the project, 2,400 volunteers will participate. The event is sponsored by Sky Arts (the satellite broadcaster's channel devoted to "Highbrow Arts") and is being unofficially covered by The Guardian. Unsurprisingly for the Great British Public, the 'quality' of the 'Plinthers' (as participants are nicknamed) has varied considerably. Some have just moped around whilst making phone calls to friends & family, others have promoted charities, whilst others have entertained the crowds below and those viewing over the web (http://www.oneandother.co.uk/). There have even been a handful of brave souls who have stripped off (a dancer called Kath was completely body painted, but wore a thong, a chap called Simon was told to cover up after someone moaned to the police, and a glass artist wore glass underwear - but there has been at least one participant who got away with going completely naked for the entire hour).

But perhaps one of the bravest was up at the unsociable hour of 10pm last Saturday (when the local drunks start arriving and heckling whoever's up there) - a 48 year old transvestite who prefers to be called Mandy. Modestly dressed, she spent the hour reading her life story. The crowds below were largely well behaved, and she even got plenty of positive feedback from the Twitter feed (about a dozen or two of those watching on the web comment on the participants live via the microblogging site Twitter, using the hashtag #oneandother so other 'tweets' on the plinth action to aid the live search).

Here's Mandy's participants page, plus the video of her hour: http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/Mandy
And here's my archive of the tweets (as it's a live search, read from the bottom (oldest) to top (newest):
http://bnorwood.fastmail.fm/plinth-mandy.pdf (295k PDF - interestingly the ODT original is only 44k, but in Word format inflates to 575k)