Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche festivities are all about setting art into motion, so that’s once again how we captured our white night on the town, with this gallery of animated GIFs.
To capture the most unforgettable moments of the first warmish Nuit Blanche in recent memory, we enlisted Night Shift columnist Paul Aguirre-Livingston and Kristian Noel Pedersen, the local photoblogger behind You Get What You GIF, to stay up all night and document what they saw with this series of moving images.
Installation: Green Invaders, 2012
Artist: Yves Caizergues. Lyon, France
The Reaction: For someone who gorged daily on a junkie’s diet of Super Nintendo—or, generations worse, Xbox—there will never be anything quite like the lore of the ’80s video game. Part nostalgia, part “reconnection to the beginning of the technological era,” Caizergues’ contemporary clone light installation was inspired by Tomohiro Nishikado’s Space Invaders, a relic of the way kids passed the time before the internet and Justin Bieber. Green Invaders felt like a mix and match of art and emotion—a lo-fi, high-tech blast from the past. It had bonafide adults screaming, “Remember?!” and their kids shrugging, “Cool, it’s like a video game.” It’s also a testament to the fact that gaming will always be the original tech distraction.
Art or…: Atari?
Overheard: “It says you’re supposed to have an emotional reaction.” “Well, my emotion is leaving right now.”
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