Nuit Blanche - The Morning After

Are your feet as tired as mine? I decided to start in Yorkville and make my way through zones A, B and C in that order. I eschewed most indoor activities, except a few site-specific installations, and I figure that in 4.5 hours I only managed to experience about 30 of the estimated 130 projects that made up the event.

It was of course packed with people everywhere; Queen Street was so crowded that they might as well have opened the street to pedestrians between Gore Vale and Gladstone. I think the best thing about the whole night was that it made you look at everything more closely and with a different eye. I noticed a few architectural and artistic embellishments that are part of the regular cityscape, but which I hadn't taken in before, and I spotted a woman trying to interact with something that seemed to be not art at all, but a rather dangerous looking public works project involving underground steam.

Sadly, the Toronto Transit Performance System fell victim to gridlock. The buses were few and far between, hard to locate and – in the case of the bus I finally did manage to board out of sheer rugged determination – devoid of cultural content, because the animating artist got bus-sick. (I did hear good things about the pillow-fight bus, though. I hope the two nice people who waited for it unsuccessfully with me at Queen's Park managed to get on eventually.)

In my opinion, and apparently in the opinion of many Nuit Blanchers, the two best things of all were The Fog and The Ballroom. "Fog in Toronto #71624, 2006" by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya was an installation that intermittently filled Philosopher's Walk with inpenetrable fog. It came rolling in fast, the way it does on the ocean, and within a few seconds the landscape became a white wall, a few silhouettes the only clue to the crowd around you. People played with each other, made noises, laughed and generally had a great time experiencing the transformation of their environment.

As I expected, Darren O'Donnell's "Ballroom Dancing" was fun in a similar way, with people tossing rubber balls through the air to one another, tossing themselves onto heaps of rubber balls, dancing and generally grooving to the ten-year-old DJs' upbeat musical choices.

I made up a very small Flickr set documenting my night. The picture above shows "Four Car Washes/Four Video Artists", films by Dana Claxton, Sara Diamond, Richard Fung and Shelley Niro projected in adjacent bays of Queen's Car Wash at 1155 Queen West. The illuminated sign (Imperial Canada Share Stolen Lands) is part of the series "Presence and Resistance" by HOCK E AYE VI Heap of Birds, which appropriates public space to reaffirm aboriginal aspirations and values.