For the past year, I’ve been hearing all sorts of stories about Nuit Blanche, and seeing the crazy photos… when I heard it was coming around again – I knew I had to be a part of it.
Well, let me tell you, now that I’ve experienced it – I’ll say it’s totally awesome.
I decided to take the marathon approach: catch the afternoon train out of Ottawa to arrive in Toronto just in time for dinner (which I failed to actually do) and then begin the Night. Since 151 Front is right next to Union Station, my laptop and other extraneous crap from my backpack got dumped in my cabinet there – my $1500/mo locker 🙂 Caught the King line streetcar to Liberty village and suddenly realized I had no idea where to go… for anything. With all the research and planning I’d done ahead of time – I didn’t actually note where I wanted to be. Thankfully I was able to wrangle the Nuit Blanche website onto my Treo and eventually determined that Queen and Strachan (pronounced “Stron”, like “Strong” without the g sound) was the Zone C hub.
I looked at the map, looked at the index, and failing to figure out any effective strategy, I decided to march west along Queen – see what I could see. Fortunately this worked out for me, but a lot of the installations/exhibits were just static art galleries… looking at pictures and paintings on the wall isn’t for me, so I moved along quickly.
Despite all the stories I hear about Nuit Blanche 2006, I wasn’t prepared for interaction; the globe above was neat, but only because of it’s construction, the next exhibit I noted was Play It By Hear, where the volunteer watching over the piece was encouraging me to connect my iPod and make the pipes sing. I picked Rush’s Far Cry because it’s loud, yet inoffensive 🙂
Not far away was Secret of the Syncope II, a curious installation where they carpeted over a road, but again – the interaction: at the far end of the road, they sat at a mobile desk, where they were cutting squares of the carpet, and then tagging them with serial numbers. These were handed out and people were asked to photograph their square and submit the photos to the website for use in next year’s exhibit… Interesting – I’ll have to figure out something unique to do with mine…
Just across Queen street, there was a lot of light, a lot of people and some really cool blue sticks:
Moving along, I encountered Femmbomb, Water Fall, then this nutty show:
… I dunno… huge line-up to see it though. Checked out the Drake Hotel, which wasn’t very exciting – still early in the evening.
Then I encountered the Incursion:
Further along, Gladstone House was in full Nuit Blanche mode. Several installations and exhibits, and while many were very cool – I found the most noteworthy thing was a sticker on a streetcar stop shelter:
math, Syncros, ghoti and I were to meet at OCAD by 9:30, I started to head east, but the sidewalks were full of people, and they were spilling out on to Queen street – thus inhibiting vehicular traffic and the TTC. Despite my limited knowledge of Toronto, King street seemed like a viable opti— whaaaa???
… not wanting a Quick Lobotomy, I hurried to the King line streetcar and hauled over to OCAD.