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Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Projection Art

Dmitry Sokolov

Last weekend’s Toronto Nuit Blanche, sponsored by ScotiaBank (who incidentally has a national digital signage RFP out right now…) exposed over a million Toronto spectators to some pretty spectacular night projectons. Outdoor installations ranged form simple movie projections on facades of large concrete urban structures to choreographed audio-visual symphonies and “tweet-to-screen” projects.

In some of the more notable installations, the facade of Holt Renfrew’s flagship Bloor street location provided an incredible backdrop for a Monument to Smile – a giant projection by the artist Agnès Winter in partnership with students from OCAD. The projection, masked to the facade of the building was timed to the musical theme Smile, written by Charlie Chaplin for Modern Times.

In another installation, the spectators took part in the artwork by Tweeting their message (sometimes less than PG-rated, as made evident by the ‘manual’ privacy filter administered live from the laptop in the near-by projection truck) to a projection on the storefront of Bloor Pottery Barn. Maybe LocaModa should get in touch with this guys to sell them on their automated filter technology?

Other notable projections transformed the walls of The ROM Crystal and Rhyerson University campus buildings, each showing various artistic interpretations of new media.

Finally, ushering home the thousands that took the subway to the event, Toronto’s OneStop Media Group transformed their subway ad network to run abstract Nuit Blanche-themed video montage in pace of traditional advertising.


This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 07:26 @351 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Projection Art”

  1. max stevens-guille Says:
    October 6th, 2010 at 16:34 @732

    Thanks for publicizing this event Dimitri. Here’s another less obvious digital signage connection: my wife, Christine Irving, is an artist and I worked on the control system for her interactive flame effect installation called Flux & Fire. Here’s a video of it in operation:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/syncros/5054211459/

    I’d like to think of it as a somewhat more radical piece of customer engagement technology. 😉

    Max Stevens-Guille, EnQii Group

  2. Christine Irving Says:
    November 10th, 2010 at 17:15 @760

    We’ll it looks like radical went over well this year. Thank you to everyone who supported the art piece and voted for us as the Scotiabank Niut Blanche 2010 People’s Choice for Independent Projects. Interactive art is such an enjoyable art form be it media of fire.

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