"The story starts back in 1950, when I was five."

So begins "An American Childhood," Annie Dillard's memoir of growing up in Point Breeze. In bright blue electronic letters, the words scroll up along the edge of the sweeping roof of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. They stop at the top of the roof, but the thought appears to climb into the sky and out to the world.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Jenny Holzer with her "For Pittsburgh" art installation at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. Click photo for larger image.

"For Pittsburgh," Jenny Holzer's newest art installation, will take about a day and a night to present the entire text of Dillard's book on the outdoor walkway leading to the terrace overlooking the Allegheny River.

Pajama party, anyone?

Comprising about 1,500 blue light-emitting diode tubes, "For Pittsburgh" also will display the texts of Thomas Bell's "Out of This Furnace" and John Edgar Wideman's Homewood Trilogy, "Sent for You Yesterday," "Hiding Place" and "Damballa."

Three years in the making, the piece debuts at 9 tonight after Holzer's invitation-only slide talk to about 280 members of the city's arts community. For now, it will be illuminated only at night and during convention center events. If an adjacent hotel is built, it will be active around the clock.

From across the river, it will appear as strips of blue light. But from 10th Street, the words should be easily read.

Holzer, the Ohio-born conceptual artist who came to fame in the early 1980s for her provocative aphorisms, saw "For Pittsburgh" for the first time on Sunday and felt relief.

"I didn't want to make an abomination," she said yesterday afternoon as it was being tested. "I liked how the text worked and I was happy to have very distinct voices on opposite sides" of the walkway. The Wideman works scroll up the east side of the roof, with Bell and Dillard alternating on the west.

She chose those books, she said, because "they sang out from the texts that were recommended to me."

Now she's talking with August Wilson about producing one of his plays on the tubes.

"I couldn't believe my luck. I had a bashful attack about approaching him," Holzer said, but in the spring found herself waiting in line with him to receive an honorary doctorate from New School University in Greenwich Village.

Paul Miller, co-founder and chief engineer of Sunrise Systems, the Massachusetts custom LED sign company that has produced Holzer's work since the mid-1980s, said "For Pittsburgh" relies on persistence of vision to create a coherent image on the retina. Sunrise designed the tube system for a piece Holzer did in 2002 for a telephone company's new headquarters building in Norway, where it was installed under the eaves of the facade. This is its second application.

Each book in "For Pittsburgh" has about 450,000 characters, and will take about 20 hours, on average, to cycle through the LED tubes. Each side of the display has about 750 tubes stretching from the bottom edge of the convention center's roof up to its peak.

The letters, about 3-foot-high-by-1-foot-wide, scroll vertically up the horizontal tubes, which are about 2 inches wide, 14 inches long and spaced about 7 inches apart.

Yesterday, Holzer worked with Miller to resolve punctuation issues.

"The commas look ridiculous," Holzer said. "You go, why is that tadpole there?"

In addition to displaying novels, plays and other existing texts, the transmissions can be interrupted as needed to communicate important news.

"Rather than a public building that's stuck with an inscription of 200 years ago, you can make it be responsive to the times," Tom Sokolowski said yesterday at the test run. Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum, was a member of the artist selection jury.

"For Pittsburgh" is Holzer's longest light work and the largest of more than 25 artworks commissioned for the convention center's $2 million public art program, funded by matching public and private funds. The Holzer work's price tag is $885,000; it is expected to add about $50 a month to the center's electric bill when fully operational.