A Little Touch of Blanche in the Nuit! Oct. 2016

I was unable to get out to this year's Nuit Blanche, unfortunately. If you follow this blog, you know that I'm a member of the Toronto Welsh Male Voice Choir, and our first concert of the season was on the afternoon of Sunday, October 2. It was way out in Mount Forest, which necessitated an early rise on Sunday to hitch a ride with a fellow chorister. It also meant that Sunday chores had to be done on Saturday instead, so I couldn't work in hours at Nuit Blanche along with everything else.

Happily, there were a couple of extended installations at Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto, and I got out on the 9th to catch those. They were pretty spectacular, so I will make a brief blog entry on both of them.


One was by "Director X," and was entitled Death of the Sun. It was a video projection of our sun inside a huge globe set on a pedestal in the middle of NPS.

As we all know, our sun will go nova, then burn out, according to science, in about four billion years. This installation is a speculative representation of what that will look like. I took some videos to show how the projection presented these occurrences, kind of in really, really fast motion.

The sun gets darker as it cools:

Then, goes nova, turning white-hot:

I got a series of pics during this phase (better resolution than the last vid) that show a constantly-changing surface of swirling gases:

And, finally, the sun goes dark, likely becoming a black hole.

Pretty amazing work!


The other installation was Floria Sigismondi's Pneuma, another spectacular video display, this one projected on a wall of water jetting out from the pool at NPS.
The vid will give you some idea of what it was like:

(Apologies for the vertical flare at some points - I unfortunately shot the vid against the projector lamp - my bad.)

And, here are some pics to show more of it:

As you can see, it was pretty cool.

I was sure glad to be able to see these wonderful works of art this time around. I've had schedule conflicts with Nuit Blanche due to choir commitments in past years, so, fingers crossed, it doesn't keep happening.
Looking forward to Nuit Blanche 2017!