Sargasso - Philip Beesley & team will launch new installation during Luminato! Can Not Wait!

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Description:

"A visionary architectural pioneer creates a responsive landscape to infuse one of downtown's busiest spaces with astonishing new life.

A worldwide pioneer in the fast-growing field of responsive architecture, Beesley and his team of collaborators pose the question “could architecture come alive?” In reply he creates spaces that dissolve into forest-like hovering fields, kin to primitive life-forms within dense jungles and ocean reefs. These responsive environments offer bodily immersion and wide-flung perception. In this new installation, Beesley combines visionary design with high-tech digital engineering to turn an everyday public space into a world of wonder.
Sargasso refers to the vast, tangled floating masses of living matter and cast-off material that drifts at the centre of the Atlantic. The environment within the sweeping atrium of the Allen Lambert Galleria makes a vast canopy, a sanctuary that slowly shifts and floats above the city. The building is no longer an entity of steel, glass, and stone but a participant in a symbiotic artistic event that shapes the nature of the environment itself.

Commissioned by Luminato."

WHOOT! Aurora, Installation by Philip Beesley wins People's Choice Award in Nuit Blanche. Well deserved!

Attendance held steady at this year’s Nuit Blanche, and the all-night arts festival pumped tens of millions into the local economy, according to figures released by the city Tuesday.

A little under a million people came to the event, which saw 130 art installations set up across central Toronto on Oct. 2 and 3, the same as last year. Slightly more of those attendees came from out of town – 140,000, compared to 100,000 in 2009.

While the festival itself is free, the sheer number of people on the streets and out-of-town tourists were estimated to have generated $34.7-million in revenue for businesses, up from $18-million last year.

The city also announced the winners of this year’s Nuit Blanche Peoples’ Choice Awards. They included Aurora, a series of chain-mounted lights suspended in the atrium of the old Royal Conservatory of Music building, that lit up based on peoples’ movement; XXIX, where scores of speakers played 29 singers singing in different languages in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum; and Flux and Fire, a platform near Lamport Stadium that, using motion detectors, would spew forth three-metre-long columns of flame.

Curators are also accepting submissions for next year’s installment, the festival’s sixth. The deadline for submitting ideas for city-produced projects in Dec. 15, while those hoping to create independently-funded works have until Feb. 15.