Take My Night with you to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche! You can access a mobile-optimized version of your itinerary on any mobile device at scotiabanknuitblanche.ca
Comprised of 3,144 bicycles Forever Bicycles forms a complex labyrinth-like monument to the rapidly changing social environment in China and around the globe.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry film screening at 7pm /9pm /11pm /1am /3am /5am
Extended Project: Revisit this project between October 6 – 27.
Two driverless cars loop at a constant speed. The cars travel in a figure-eight loop tragectory, threatening to collide. Through a playful action and a cynical tone, the artist loops symbols of wealth and power.
Workparty is staging a small toy protest inside City Hall inspired by Russian activists who, in 2012, were banned from mounting a similar demonstration in response to alleged election corruption.
Is this art? How much of an art is it? VSVSVS is here to help you question these questions. Call 1-855-474-8278 toll free to speak with a highly trained advisor. Visit City Hall to watch a live stream of the call centre.
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Various-sized bicycles have been modified and made into double-headed pairs. Mounted back-to-back, the audience can test-ride the bikes by negotiating with each other who will take the lead.
A series of clotheslines are strung with 5,000 pairs of socks, creating a canopy overhead. The mass of socks reflect the number of people without adequate housing in Toronto.
Socks hung during the event will be donated to shelters across the GTA.
The Everything Company will construct a large-scale cedar smoking hut powered by three bicycles. The artists will invite participants to pedal throughout the night to keep the salmon smoking, ultimately serving the smoked fish.
Music Box is an absurd mechanical contraption that creates frenetic musical noise in joyful response to the carnival-like atmosphere of Nuit Blanche. Despite the rationality of gears and pulleys, it rejects logic in favour of an outburst of feeling.
Franck Scurti's installation consists of bicycle wheels fitted with clockwork mechanisms. Each wheel mechanism also moves the hands of the clock in a reverse rotation.
Sit on a stool and watch the wheels turn.
Join a ritual of slowly dismantling a massive origami float – dispersing into thousands of paper helmets worn by visitors. Paper Orbs activates a parade which culminates in the eventual creation of an alternate paper float.
Tortoise is a series of assemblage sculptures using standard picnic tables — a representation of North American leisure culture — as building blocks to transform them into elaborate fort-like structures that resist their essential banality.
Night Shift is a durational performance inspired by Louis XIV’s Le Ballet de la Nuit, where he played the Sun King. Dancers will endure from dusk until dawn, dancing and making gold confetti in anticipation of the Sun King’s appearance at sunrise.
Caledonia Dance Curry (Swoon) is a street artist based in New York City. She is known for her wheat pasted art that appears across the world. They are often pasted in areas that interact with their physical space and the community where they exist.
“Ferris Wheel” returns to the simplest roots of the spectacle. The homespun midway attraction explores how a steel structure created in the backyard and decorated with multi-coloured wire and LED lights can convey a sense of magical celebration.
Composed of horizontally stacked tubes of different sizes, PARALLAX uses light to articulate movement. The tubes are tightly packed apertures, a dot screen controlling the amount of light the viewer can see based on their location.
Chairs contain memories, as if each person who sat on them left a piece of himself. This work evokes the Babel Tower myth: a humanity speaking with one voice and engaged in building a better future.
Tadashi Kawamata is represented by kamel mennour, Paris.
Extended Project: Revisit this project between October 6 – 14.
Take a Load Off creeps through an alley: a centipede assemblage of found furniture. Curl up in the glow of old lamps, sink into hybrid couches, and discover the histories embedded in the objects of this surreal living room.
Can machines fight for what they want? In an automated tug of war played out in the arena of the Roy Thomson Hall artificial pond, animated fishing rods battle over their quarry. Theses mechanical performers are imbued with a desire to compete.
(X)Static Clown Factory is a Seuss-inspired enactment of the economy of desire. These are working clowns, the float is their workshop, the parade route their assembly line, and we will all experience the night shift.
Shrine is the destination of an unexpected nocturnal pilgrimage. The most humble of objects, the common garbage bin, rises up in monumental stacks to form a sacred space; that of a Gothic Cathedral.
Fusing his landscape-based art practice with a strange ancient Scottish ritual, Simon Frank will cover himself in burrs, the ingenious hooked seed of the Burdock plant, and walk throughout the Financial District. Follow @burrman13 on Twitter.
One hundred regional beekeepers dressed in their bee-suits will participate in a massive collective meditation.
The choreographed work will feature periods of guided silent meditation, synchronized stretching, and musical accompaniment.
In Howl, a loading dock is transformed into the site of a hunt. A coyote-on-rabbit chase loops along the rails of a steel roller coaster surrounded by mechanical birds and decoy deer, offering an absurdist take on how we represent the natural world.
Lane’s sculptures involve the cutting of lace patterns into steel oil tanks and I-beams. Alternately strong and delicate, masculine and feminine, they confuse function and ornament,turningrecycled steel into emblems of a lost industrial age.
Extended Project: Revisit this project between October 6 – 14.
A magical roving creature covered head to toe with soft colorful stuffed animals! Do you want to replace your sadness with joy? Come find this incredible being and she will give you a big cozy hug!
Create your dream with The Virtual Brain. Wear wireless headsets to transmit your brain waves to live musicians, and steer the animations inside a dome.
For a stunning audiovisual experience, dreamers enter the Dreamery and spectators enter the Periphery.
A child meets a giant spider that is considering vengeance for all the insects that we have killed. This is an interactive work where you move the spider, spin a wheel of fortune, ask the child/oracle a question and hear her answer. Action and insight.
Observe a sculpture in cardboard of an elephant’s head emerging from the back end of a white cube truck. The work uses animal imagery to symbolize political issues especially how we often avoid facing even the most obvious issues around us.
These hybrid machines, part exercise bike, part bicycle, connected to electrical generators, will power various electronic/electrical systems. The participants complete the work by pedaling.
Inspired by traditional mummers parades, A Quack Cure will bring to life a merry troupe of otherwise-extinct creatures for a night of revelry aboard a float designed especially for these strange animals.
The sphere with its pure & powerful geometry is at once familiar & strange. It is deployed as an interactive armature for carrying the temporal imaging that will create a dynamic spatial & social experience within the environment of the parade.
Exploring the intersection of sound and sight, A Touch of Light is a visualization of the live performances taking place at the CMC. The piece repurposes over 100 light bulbs into a real-time processing of alternative musical notation and energy.
We are inspired by the beauty of words that sparkle like stars in the night and phrases that embed themselves into memory in our piece "The Somnambulist".
Texts from Hemingway and Proust are displayed in glittering crystals evocative of advertising.
lightbridge is inspired by the notion that light is like a bridge connecting the earth and the stars.
Through an enclosure of LED lights and a hypnotic musical score, lightbridge transforms a 250 ft pedestrian bridge into a kind of hyperspace tunnel.
Everyday Marvels is an episodic performance installation conceived, created and directed by Shannon Litzenberger. The 16 miniature vignettes have been created by 8 local choreographers based on Lorna Crozier’s recently published volume of poetry.
This sculpture is a futuristic presentation involving 400 lbs of poured transparent plastic saturated with 4,000 feet of fibre optic tails. This astonishing work of art has metamorphic lighting qualities.
The Other Side of the Gardiner re-envisions the space beneath a familiar piece of urban infrastructure with atmospheric tools of light, snow and sound. It creates a surreal and inviting landscape to suggest new type of public realm.