Posts tagged ‘experience’
Sep
02
2010
The Wilderness Downtown
One of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire, has collaborated with Google and writer/director Chris Milk to create an experimental video for their song “We Used to Wait”. Made to play in Google Chrome, The Wilderness Downtown starts off asking for the address of your childhood home and then becomes in an incredible audio and visual experience that uses choreographed browser windows of varying sizes popping open or closing and displays animations of digital flying birds flying from one window to the next and a pair of feet running along a street. All of that builds up to a climax when images of your street and childhood home are blended into the video, creating moments of surprise, delight and nostalgia. Self-reflection and sentimental thoughts are triggered near the end with pause allows you to write a message to your younger self, after which animated trees sprout all along your old street.
Using HTML5 technology, the collaborators have created a technologically impressive and creatively piece of work to create an awe-inspiring audio/visual experience.
Oct
06
2009
Nuit Blanche ’09
Torontonians came out in droves last Saturday for the 4th annual “free all-night contemporary art thing” that ran from sunset to sunrise. It’s spectacular to see such an event bring out so much people and liveliness out to the streets during the wee hours of the night to experience city-wide art exhibits. Projects ranged from the playful and participatory to the haunting and mysterious.
Of course, this type of creative happening also brings out spontaneous activities unplanned by the city: buskers with fire and chainsaws, collectives encouraging group gatherings in the middle of the street, and my favourite, an awesome 8-bit musician by the name of deadbeatblast performing electronic music using the sounds from playing GameBoy and Nintendo games.
Unfortunately in the 6 hour span I was out, I didn’t get the chance to see all the exhibits on my must-see list and completely had to skip out on an entire zone. It’s become a victim of its own success — meaning huge lineups and massive crowding. Some projects had up to 75 minute waiting times, such as the fantastic Space Becomes the Instrument (but quite worth it in the end.) In total I probably waited around 2.5 hours in lineups, which was a horribly inefficient way to spend my time.
Below maps the highlights of my evening from 10pm to 4am.
