Toronto City Hall

Toronto City Hall is Toronto's landmark building in the heart of the City. Its two curved towers of different width and height and its unique inward looking facade enclosing the UFO-shaped conference room shape the appearance of Ontario's capital and also serve as the logo of the municipality.

Toronto City Hall was the venue for Stereoscope at the 2008 Nuit Blanche event. For Project Blinkenlights, the building was a special challenge as its structure breaks with our established look of flat, rectangular facades we used in our former installations in Berlin and Paris.

Multiple Screens

The building features two towers: the West Tower with 22 windows on each floor with the facade being broken up in two areas with 7 floors in the lower and 8 floors in the upper part. The East Tower is slightly larger, featuring 30 windows per floor with 9 consecutive floors in the lower and 12 floors in the upper part. In total, the building features 960 windows facing inwards.

Stereoscope used the facade in a variety of ways. First, all windows were considered to be part of one huge virtual screen where images and animations moved from part to part, from tower to tower, essentially combining the disjoint structures into a huge luminous canvas artists could "paint" on.

Another approach was to address the four parts of the facade separately, essentially creating four individual screens that could be used for isolated playback or interactive gameplay, mixing the content in a layered fashion so that "unused" screens continued to show a background animation while others presented specifically created movies and animations in their screen.

We have more information on how people could participate by creating animations, including a more in-depth description of how to convert animations into our movie format to address the screen.