Talking to Walls: A Conversation About the Public Realm

Thursday night Cristina and I were up in Toronto at Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, participating in the Christopher Hume curated exhibition, Public Realm.

We did a series of projections with short texts / fill-in-the-blanks that dealt with issues of public and private space, which were generated from the answers to the questionnaires we created, responses on Twitter, and conversations amongst ourselves.

Public Realm is up until January 31st, and there’s documentation of the projections up in the gallery along with a growing collection of our questionnaires with a ton of great answers. If you’re in the neighbourhood, stop by, there’s a lot of great work in the show!!!

After the jump, there’s a photo from all 100 fill-in-the-blanks that we projected.

Cristina and I arrived in Toronto in the late afternoon on Thursday, leaving us enough time to catch up with her cousin and then head down to Propeller to do some quick tests.

Thankfully, Google Streetview provided a fairly accurate representation of what we were going to be able to work with, once we arrived. We had originally looked at it back in December.

Setting up for the test — our projector managed to live through the cold and the battery gave us a full hour of power (again, despite the cold) and even seemed to have some life left!

Marcella, Cristina’s cousin, was a huge help and amazingly sweet, working the stationary camera, introducing us to some amazing food, and letting us get a good night’s sleep after it was all over!

With only two of us, we didn’t get as many angles of the projection as we have before, but I liked the uniformity of the entire set of photos (you can see them below).

Some of the brave folks who stopped by for a while to talk!

Cristina trying to stay warm — by the end we were shouting our answers to the the fill-in-the-blanks — it was amazingly fun.

And here’s the entire set of projections …

The next morning, we headed back to Propeller to install our photographic documentation and saw this fence being erected right where we were projecting. We were so lucky that we were able to do the projection Thursday night, as we would’ve had to find a different place if the fence had already been up.

Some of the questionnaires filled in. It was great to see that people had started to fill them in and tape them to the wall themselves!

And, a small sample of the 100-something photos we hung up.

It was an awesome time! On top of pulling off the projection, meeting a ton of great people at the opening, catching up with Cristina’s family, we also saw a couple people from Windsor !!!! It was pretty much the best trip to Toronto ever.