Your Guide to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s unique and contemporary annual art event, transforms the streets of the city into a landscape of modern art exhibitions and experiences. With more than 130 art projects split over three zones dividing the downtown core, each area blends a formal mix of exhibitions and spectacular independent work. To help organize your evening – well, whole night until dawn – we’ve made a list of a dozen spots to make sure to visit this Saturday. (We’ve even sorted them by area for you. Aren’t we thoughtful?)

Zone A (Downtown North)
Electric Signs – Exhibition
Exactly the way it sounds, Sam Durant has taken the ubiquitous, neon signs from convenience stores, restaurants and the like and transformed them to replicate hand-painted signs used in protest marches of liberation struggles in North America and Australia between 1960 and 2007. Enlarged and displayed to the face of each sign, viewers can compare the replicas to the hand painted originals.

The Police Station – Exhibition
Althea Thauberger is creating a temporary ‘Police Station’, where random passersby will be ‘arrested’ by actors in law enforcement costumes and temporarily detained, during which time they will participate in a workshop with the artist, and before being ‘released’, receive copies of their ‘processing paperwork’ which they can then redistribute at their leisure. Why wouldn’t you want to participate in something that will let you be the artistic one?

Limelight: Saturday Night – Open Call
A relatively simple concept, Limelight: Saturday Night takes two local street lights and replaces them with theatre spotlights, changing the street into a vast stage, letting viewers become performers, and highlighting the subtle alliteration between spectacle and surveillance. From solo performers to couples and families, everyone is invited to perform. Past participants have ranged from hilarious, tipsy, tender and skillful. Which will you be?

Cloudscape – Independent Project
A beautiful arrangement of constructed reed and paper forms that appear to float and soar through space located on Pottery Road, near Todmorden Mills Park. A nod to traditional Chinese landscape paintings, the exhibit depicts water transforming into clouds, which is meant to examine dualism and isolation. Draped all along the street, the clouds are bold in colour and as close as you’re ever going to get without hopping on a plane.

Zone B (Downtown Central/East)
Flightpath Toronto – Exhibition
In support of Nuit Blanche, the City of Toronto has arranged a special exhibition that is a participatory spectacle inspired by the birds of Nathan Phillips Square. Held outside of City Hall, the exhibit invites everyone to explore the idea of urban flight, offering various aviation-themed activities like urban flight school and even fly-lines that allow people to be ‘enwinged’ and visualize the city from above, the ways we move through it now, and in the future. Because who doesn’t love city birds…

Face Music – Exhibition
Held on the Yonge-Dundas Square Stage, a group of robotic sculptures compose their own music based on the input of user participation. Micro-video cameras are mounted on each of the robots, and as they move toward people’s bodies, they capture facial snapshots that are processed, pixilated and transformed into a melody and rhythm. Each song then becomes a part of the artwork, which is joined with other’s soundscapes to create an experience that narrates the entire evening.

Shannon’s Fireflies – Collaboration
A grid of suspended cube lights that have sensors respond to the voices of viewers by converting their words into light, sound and movement. By using whisper stations, people can talk to each other and see their words create light that’s disassembled and reassembled as it passes through the air. Suitable to modern technology, the ‘fireflies’ send the messages in any direction, to any participant or even split fragments and send them to everyone. Relive all the fun of phantom phone calls and vanishing text messages at this event.

Honey, I’m Home ! – Independent Project
It has the potential to be one of the funniest exhibits in the festival. Ryerson University presents Honey, I’m Home!, a performance piece where participants can step into the role of Danny Turner from Full House or Bill Cosby from The Cosby Show. Taped on a TV studio set behind a glass wall, each performance is broadcast to the outdoor audience, forcing members to view a traditional scene with an unusually cast ‘father’ in the traditional family role. Relive your favourite 90s family sitcoms, located on Church St.

Zone C (Downtown South/West)
I Just Know That Something Good Is Going To Happen – Exhibition
Artist Curtis Grahauer recreates the banal location shoot often used for film and television. Using trailers, lights, crew members and even simulated rain and fog, he will attempt to recreate something that is integrated into our daily lives that often provide people with the feeling that something good is going to happen. Be it an action, student, or celebrity, you’ll have to drop past this event to find out.

The Tie-Break – Exhibition
Set as a performance of what ESPN called “the most riveting episode in the sport’s history,” Neuspiel and Pugen reenact the legendary fourth set tie-breaker from the 1980 Wimbledon Gentlemen’s Singles Finals between Björn Borg, the calm and composed Swede, and John McEnroe, the openly emotional, determined American. Each hour, the pair will recreate each stroke and bounce of the prolific event. So if you weren’t quite old enough to enjoy the match when it went live, you can take a look at it now.

City Mouse – Collaboration
Held on the interior main floor of the Scotia Plaza, an out-of-place forest fills the room, with sounds, smells and forms of nature disguising the engineered structures of the space. Within these woods are animals that have been manipulated to reflect their new environment, their bodies house scenes of office life and their organs replaced with workers. What’s cooler than taking the outdoors in? We know! Adding fake small people into fake small animals.

The Way Up Is The Way Down – Independent Project
A large balloon floating high above Bay Street flashes intermittently as a floating amber beacon. What makes this unique, however, is that the balloon also gives an auditory signal. A bell-like tone emits based on participant interaction, triggered by a phone call placed to the bell. The phone call simply rings, and transforms the space, effectively transforming the public’s civic engagement. Cool, right? Phone it in!