What’s Innate?

This past Saturday evening I visited Nathan Phillips Square for the Cavalcade of lights for the weekly fireworks that are set off atop Toronto city hall. Upon arrival I discovered that a new media installation and performance piece was set up by French new media Xavier de Richemont titled “Immersion”. It’s a colourful 15 minute projection piece that is displayed on the west side of old city hall which runs every half an hour. The piece focuses on two key concepts, the first being the idea of how a building can be used as a canvas, the second concept is the abundance of water as a resource in Canada and how that shapes our country. The presentation began with chalk outlines being “drawn” onto the building, outlining the building and its details. It was truly a unique visual to see a large building being traced and outlined with chalk lines. More and more layers of chalk lines are added and different colours of chalk are used. Various other animated scenes whirl across the building about Native Canadian culture. Then the building began to “fill up” with water, which froze then began to crack and fall off the building.


The images themselves definitely weren’t the most stunning, the piece was more about the scale and unique projection screen being used. Personally other than the chalk outlines I found the projected animations to drag out and not really engage observers. It felt like some of the images were projected because it was interesting medium not because the images themselves had anything to say. Due to this, a lot of people lost interest at around five minutes into the display once the novelty of the medium had worn off. To me it was as though Richemont had the opportunity to truly take people’s breath away with the large scale and beautiful architecture but didn’t have that once moment where the audience was truly stunned like he has done with other installations in Montreal and Budapest. On the other hand, the building was very difficult to project onto and the accuracy and positioning of the projections is a high achievement. Richemont used five different projectors in covered tents setup on the raised walkway in Nathan Phillips Square to project onto the building across the street. The projections were slightly washed out due to ambient light downtown which is to be expected and actually photographed much better, more rich saturated colours, than it look with the human eye.
The accompanying soundtrack to the display was also lacking, as Barthes uses the term, “punctum” to captivate or speak to viewers. It was a very atmospheric and electronic original soundtrack which didn’t really suit the romanesque architecture and the older style images of Native Canadians. The one part where the soundtrack had impact on me was when the ice was falling off the building and revealing the bright colours underneath. Nathan Phillips Square felt like it was shaking with the deep powerful rumbling as the chunks hit the ground at the bottom of the building.

Overall the projection show was definitely a unique and interesting concept and the medium of Old City Hall provided a unique platform. The content itself, felt like it was lacking an amount of meaning or “punctum” for most of the show. Perhaps this was viewed in the wrong context and was meant to run while you continue about your activities at the Cavalcade of Lights, not stop and give all your attention to the projections.