FORGERY LEAGUE

Sunday 30 September 2007

Nuit Blanche 2007

Once again, Nuit Blanche was a smash. I’ve never seen another event bring the city to life in the same way - nothing like the sensory overload of Pride or Caribana, though those are great in their own ways. The streets all over downtown were packed with people of all ages, wandering from one site to the next, bumping into friends and excitedly trading recommendations. And there was such a sense of curiosity and discovery in the air - what’s that weird light in the distance? What’s waiting around the next corner?

Wonderful things:

Swintak’s ThunderEgg Alley: A Dumpster Diver’s Paradise, wherein a dingy alleyway near Spadina and College was turned into a tiny hotel using found furnishings, complete with spa, boutique and a front desk clerk who asked if we’d like to book the room (a rather cozy-looking dumpster) for a ten-minute stay. The earliest slot available wasn’t until 5:45am, sadly - it would have been great to hold a room party.

Brian Cort’s It’s A Cloud: in the north atrium of the Eaton Centre, people lay on their backs in a meadow of artificial grass and shrubbery, watching the sky projected on a screen high above while oddly-shaped clouds drifted by. The clouds, in fact, were painted by visitors to the exhibit using black paint, then scanned and cunningly rendered by a Java app.

I still maintain that the best “interactive art” is usually the simplest. In front of the Italian Consulate, there was a giant sheet of phosphorescent paper on one wall, and a dude with a great big strobe light. Strike a pose and flash! - your shadow remained frozen on the wall. A circle had formed around the screen, and people stepped in and out: oddballs with flags who’d apparently drifted in from another performance, couples kissing (to general murmurs of “Awwww..."), dancers showing off their uncanny flexibility, half a dozen people hastily lining up to form a single multi-armed silhouette.

King’s College Circle, in the heart of the U of T campus, was a scene straight out of War of the Worlds or Quatermass - an apparent UFO crash site, surrounded by emergency personnel and people in hazmat suits. I understand there was more to the piece (Marman and Borins’ Event Horizon, pictured above) but we didn’t get to see that.

The park beneath Will Alsop’s famous “tabletop” at OCAD makes a natural and comfy hub for the central exhibit zone, and a nice spot to sit for a while and catch a few artsy short films (we saw one that was an adaptation of a piece by the wonderful troupe Corpus - organizers of the Dusk Dances festival every summer).

We didn’t check out The Ghost Station, a sound installation at the abandoned subway platform Lower Bay, because the lineup literally extended around the block, and by then I was starting to fade. Which meant that, sadly, we missed out on all the fun in the far west: the giant inflated locust at Lamport Stadium, the freaky looking animations at Massey Harris Park, the video projection-graffiti bike (based on that Graffiti Research Lab project), and Misha Glouberman’s Terrible Noises For Beautiful People: Music for a participatory noise choir.

It was barely 1am by the time I crashed. I’m determined to stay up later next year, and maybe bring a bike to get from one site to another. And more than that - to participate. To create an exhibit, or help out with one, or even just grab a guitar and busk somewhere. Dear city and sponsors: let there be a next year.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Municipal Mind: Manifestoes for the Creative City, an inspiring collection of short essays and manifestoes from Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio di Cicco. Nuit Blanche is just the sort of thing he prescribes: a celebration that brings out the “elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity ... the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

It takes a poet to say what planners and politicians almost never dare. It’s easy, especially given the City of Toronto’s precarious financial situation, to get lost in talk of dollars and cents. Art, creativity, love: these things are what make us - and our cities - human.

Photos at the Flickr pool.

Tuesday 4 September 2007

Tobermory

I’m lucky enough to work at a small company full of cool people. All friends, all the sort of people you can have a good conversation with about aesthetics or theatre or philosophy, and hang out comfortably with for a week. So this past week we all packed up and headed to a cottage near the tip of the Bruce Peninsula.

There was some shop talk, like how to get more “good” clients - the kind of organizations that are trying to make the world better - and plotting strategy for our video department. We did a bit of improv and other creative exercises, too, and there was a lot of good food, light reading, ping-pong and beach-going, as well as some hiking along the northernmost part of the Bruce Trail, which runs all the way down the Escarpment to Niagara Falls.

I did a lot of poking around in the woods and along the lake. Funny thing - while everyone else is admiring the grand, sweeping vistas, I’m usually crouched with a magnifier studying the tiniest things I can find. So I spent a lot of time this trip puttering around with our camera, exploring the possibilities of macro photography.

Of the places we visited, I think my favorite was along the rocky shore at the end of the road. The ancient, glacier-carved sedimentary rock is like a garden of miniatures - every few inches you’ll find a little crevasse or a tiny pothole that’s become home to an even tinier plant or two, comprising a startling variety of species. And of course, there were lichens and mosses and ferns, whose primitive forms hold a strange fascination for me.

In the evenings we watched Rome on DVD (ah, what a horrible, lecherous, bloodthirsty lot) and played with the camera some more. After a few light-painting experiments using exposures of several seconds, we hitched the camera to Sean’s laptop, using a piece of software called iStopMotion to create our own animations, in the style of Pika Pika.

Sean’s gone and created a Flickr set of our experiments, and uploaded a video (click the “Read more” link). A few of my photos are up on Flickr as well.

In all, a wonderful week.