TorontoTravel: Nuit Blanche 2009 Video

Nuit Blanche, Torontos overnight contemporary art festival, has been a huge success since its inception in 2006. From 6:55 pm on October 3, 2009 to sunrise on October 4, 2009, more than 130 projects and installations were scheduled to entice and intrigue an audience of about one million people. I headed downtown by subway and arrived at about 10 pm at Queen and Yonge where the streets were already crowded with revelers. I made my way to City Hall where Beautiful Light: the 4 Letter Word Machine by D.A. Therrien was installed high in the air between the towers of New City Hall. Four letter words were being created interspersed with unknown alphanumeric characters. Combined with strange voice recordings coming from the huge loudspeakers, this installation to me represented a form of alien communication.

Inside City Hall I followed the crowd into the Council Chambers where we saw a video installation called Day Equals Night by Adrian Blackwell representing a day in the life of Regent Park. A rotating projector was displaying images around the room, with the image slowly moving in a circle.

Bay Street was blocked to road traffic, so immersed in a huge crowd of people I made my way north to the Eaton Centre where a bronze-coloured cowboy/mime was interacting silently with the crowd. Dundas Square, with its neon lights reminiscent of Times Square in New York City, was absolutely packed with people. Inside a tent in the centre of the square I saw two more installations: Neon Lights: Light Laundry by Orest Tataryn, and Oregami Lights: Sonobi Lights by Andrew Ooi.

Then I saw a pickup truck with loudspeakers and a handful of dancers driving slowly south on Yonge Street. This moving boombox had attracted a large crowd of twenty-somethings who were dancing and partying their way south on Yonge. I joined them all the way down to Queen Street where they turned right. I continued to head south to Front Street towards the former BCE Building, now Brookfield Place, where audience members were lining up to experience Witches Cradles, 2009 by the Center for Tactical Magic. Visitors could get into a swaying pod, be equipped with ear plugs and blindfolds and outfitted with a heart rate monitor, and then experience the sensory deprivation induced by the gentle confined swaying and the absence of our most-relied-upon senses.

Heading north on Bay Street, right in front of the Toronto Stock Exchange, there was another installation: Wild Ride, 2009 by Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, provided free midway rides to an enthusiastic audience, making ironic allusions to the wild rides of the banking and financial services industry that shook the world in recent months.

The 4 Letter Word Machine was still going when I walked past City Hall at about 1:30 am and the crowds were just as thick. Although I still needed to wrap my head around some of the installations, it was a great experience seeing Toronto so full of people in the middle of the night.