Skip to content

Spacing

Canadian Urbanism Uncovered

Culture

People Walking 2006

By

Read more articles by

Walking down Bloor on Saturday night after seeing A Prairie Home Companion at the Cumberland (go see this wonderful movie, Meryl Streep can totally sing), we saw LED people walking in front of the Rogers building. At night it was striking. Cars were slowing down to see it. From a Canwest article:

An unusual video screen has sprung up in front of the Rogers Communications headquarters on Toronto’s Bloor Street East featuring images of pedestrians.

It was created by world-famous contemporary British artist Julian Opie, whose work can be seen in London, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin and Korea.

Entitled “People Walking 2006,” the LED installation was commissioned by Rogers and is the first of its kind in Toronto.

The flat screen measures 10 feet by 6 feet and features life-sized electronic “stick figures” walking randomly in both directions. Delineated by tens of thousands of tiny LED lights, the screen runs — or walks — around the clock.

Opie used his own line drawings of nine real people to create the images.

According to a release from Rogers, the artist hopes the public art reflect “the everyday, living dynamics of the people” at the busy street corner.

Recommended

7 comments

  1. the irony is that, at least I’ve always felt, that Bloor East is one of the more desolate stretches in downtown Toronto.

  2. Yeah, the buildings don’t front the street very well, at least in a way that has human activity — and there are some churches and those insurance buildings with fancy lawns. The apt building across from Rogers, on the southwest corner of Jarvis and Bloor has a Starbucks now, with patio, so there is some new life. And on the other side of the Mt. Pleasant bridge, there are some stories, around that weird little mall, that heads over to Sherborn, where there is some life.

  3. that seems really cool.
    tho i (and along with my friends) despise rogers.
    they just went too far with renaming the skydome.

  4. Is this piece of art intended to be permanent? Because it’s very cool, from the photos at least.

  5. I wondered that too — the screen has a big concrete foundation, that looks like it was poured just for it, so it appears to be permanent.

    Electronic public art brings up some interesting maintenance issues — as some people noted on the urban toronto forum, there’s some worry that this will turn into the Arc en Ciel https://spacing.ca/toronto/?p=594. but perhaps Rogers will take better of it than the TTC did with Yorkdale neon.

  6. I know it may seem like self promotion, as I work there, but the AGO has a brand new Julian Opie installation as well of his stick figures. If anyone likes this one they should go check it out.