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Stephen HumphreyStephen Humphrey is a freelance writer and journalist who has lived in Toronto since 1994...
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Luminato (26), OpenCity, public art (3), RedBall Project (2)Designer Job Rutger shows an image of the platform at Dundas subway station after it has morphed into a tunnel-sized version of the 70s video game Pong. He calls it Plong!
Commuters will activate gigantic dash-like Pong paddles just by walking around. Strangers must engage one another to bat around balls of light. They might even socialize. Rutger and his firm, OpenCity Projects, were asked to redesign Toronto locations as social spaces for a Luminato exhibit titled Icebreakers.
Another slide shows slender greenhouses between high-rise buildings.
?Toronto is very rapidly transforming itself from a horizontal city into a vertical city,? Rutger says. ?We haven?t really thought about how we connect this community. Where are the playgrounds?”
Luminato teamed Rutger with two installation artists for a panel discussion about public art called The Urban Playground. The trio discussed what it means to put art in spaces where people live and work.
As with Plong! Toronto artist Sarah Lazarovic coaxed the private, digital universe into public surroundings with her piece, Older, which displays her favourite Twitter posts.
Lazarovic describes the tweets the way collage artists refer to found art.
“Lots of the things people drop are just meant to be fleeting and disappear and that’s fine,” she says. “But then at other times people write these really beautiful things. There’s a lot of beauty that disappears.”
While Lazarovic so far doesn?t work beyond the scale of her “rickety old garage,” New York artist Kurt Perschke makes whole cities the backdrop for the 15-foot, cherry red sphere of his RedBall Project.
Perschke says he is driven by a need to escape the “white box” of the art gallery. He says his motivations are different from the client-focussed projects of Rutger?s company.
Still Perschke, like Rutger, must negotiate with property owners and city planners who control spaces he wants to use.
“I think any time you’re an artist and you’re coming to a city, and you’re, like, I want to block this street, I want to come over here and block the sidewalk, people get nervous,” Perschke says.
Artists and contractors face not only cautious committees, but the potential of strong community reactions to their work. Take, for example, Daniel Libeskind’s crystal-like extension to the Royal Ontario Museum.
While Rutger says he doesn’t mind the “shockwaves” which often mark a public artwork’s early days, he says that artists and designers can’t afford to be obscure.
“If people don’t get it, it doesn’t work,” he says.
People seem to get the RedBall. It is swarmed by the people who discover it wedged into an archway at Old City Hall. They treat it as a plaything, putting on mock displays of strength, like Atlas holding up the world.
Have a look at our RedBall photo gallery.