To further complicate and overload what will likely be the busiest (and hopefully again most wonderful) night of the year in Toronto, I suggest you make a stop on your Nuit Blanche rounds at the Lennox Contemporary Gallery at 12 Ossington (at Queen) for Digital Alchemy. Here, the Canadian Film Centre Media lab will be exhibiting their newest interactive prototypes as well as screen their new interactive feature film, Late Fragment (produced along with the National Film Board).
I wrote a short article in the Globe and Mail about the film during its TIFF premiere two weeks ago — apart from being the first interactive feature made in North America, the film was shot in and around Toronto, like on top of the windswept Scarborough Bluffs giving our fine eastern borough a Wuthering Heights feel.
The action happens in and around Toronto, from the Dunn Avenue Bridge in Parkdale with Go Trains rushing by to nearby Liberty Village rooftops. Interiors range from a downtown Victorian home to a 1950s Mimico bungalow. It’s a dark tour of a Toronto that looks familiar, but seen from a different angle. One scene takes us under the Gardiner Expressway by the Humber River where Faye has a redemptive fantasy, where she hurls the bike her husband bought her daughter into the water.
The film can be screened all night long at interactive viewing stations, or “preformed” for you by one of the creators at 7pm, 9pm, 11pm, 1am, 3am and 5am.
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There are also five new prototypes on display. The CFC Media lab is where we developed [murmur] back in 2002, and it continues to produce projects that use technology in new and innovative ways to tell stories.
Two prototypes in particular focus on public space. Strata is “a mobile based, GPS-enabled, interactive mediascape that features historic Canadian sites.” Guided by a GPS-enabled mobile phone to various locations, visitors can explore the stories of how these sites came to be. Fort York is a site used in Strata. Witness That Place is a “locative media project that explores interactivity through a series of online mappings and marked site specific locations. By indicating stories of trauma in public spaces the public interrogates notions of space, memory and trauma.” Locations around Toronto are also used for this project.
The Digital Achemy is also open today and tomorrow from 12-5pm as well as from 7pm-7am during Nuit Blanche. Photo above of the the Humber River from Late Fragment.