Art all day, and all of the night

I spent some time at Nuit Blanche last night. It's an all-night art exhibition throughout Toronto. It started just before 7 pm and went until sunrise. I didn't stay out till morning, but I spent about five hours roaming the streets with thousands of other people - all of it within easy walking distance of my apartment, and that was only one of the three zones where it was taking place.

There was a wide variety of pieces. Some were video (a subtitled movie of driving through Toronto was shown on the wall of the power station I can see from my window), some were sculpture, some were performance. There was music and dance. A number of them were participatory - the Zombies in Condoland piece was in the park outside my building where people could dress like zombies and stagger around, another allowed people to draw pictures on a piece of paper and attach them to wireframes, and another encouraged people to send a postcard to someone they didn't know from a different area of the city.

One piece had two opposing screens and video of what appeared to be boiling milk would play while a voice spoke. Then it would go still and silent and the other would do the same. Possibly more interesting that the piece is that it was in the old Maple Leaf Gardens which is no longer used. So I got to stand at centre ice under the scoreboard where the Leafs played for 60 some years.