2012 humber bridge sculpture

A New Way of Creating Public Art

interactive arts – the artist collective who brought you The Heart Machine for Nuit Blanche 2011 – is excited to share with you a new public art piece on the Humber Pedestrian Bridge for two months this summer. This is the first art project ever approved for mounting on the award winning Humber Pedestrian Bridge you are now standing on.Inspired by the bridge and the surrounding waterfront, this project is part of a unique initiative to bring locally created large scale public art to the city of Toronto. The sculpture is created by local volunteer artists along with interactive arts as a gift to our city. All we ask is if you like it you please donate online towards the cost of materials.

What Are They?

We are not supposed to know what they are! Think of them as a Rorschach ink blot test for your imagination.

This sculpture is here to remind us to observe and question. The world holds much more than what we are currently aware of; allowing for phenomena we have not yet imagined. We are reminded of this every time we hear of new discoveries in our oceans, forests, caves, and space explorations.

The creatures also represent yin and yang opposites. During they day they are brightly colored opaque creatures. At night they become translucent and bioluminescent with 1,200 LED lights. The once brightly colored accents now become dark shadows in a pool of light.

Buckminster Fuller, the Bridge, and this Art Piece

Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983), a famous American architect, advanced the creation of tensile structures. Tensegrity is a term he applied to suspension bridges and can be defined as “Complimentary forces suspended within a base foundation of three create unlimited tension integrity.

“Tensile designs enable a dynamic system of movement where the whole moves the part and the part moves the whole. This is poignant to us as the sculpture is suspended within a suspension bridge using engineering principals he championed.In Starting with Universe, Buckminster Fuller also had views which serendipitously discuses a similar desire for discovery and observations that inspired this sculpture:“Our definition of universe provides for the undiscovered and for the yet-to-be-discovered. Do not worry about the furthermost star which is yet to be consciously apprehended by any human being. Do not think that we have not provided for those physical or chemical phenomena as yet not observed and recorded by human or mechanical sensing devices.The existence of such phenomena may not have been postulated but they can all be accommodated by our definition of Universe… because when we start with the whole universe we have left nothing out. …Nothing could have been left out when you start with the whole Universe.”We are so excited to share with you a new public art piece that will be displayed on the Humber Pedestrian Bridge for two months this summer.

Inspired by the bridge and the surrounding waterfront, this project is part of a unique initiative to bring large scale art, created by a shared community effort, to the city of Toronto. The sculpture is a grassroots effort, being created by volunteer artists along with interactive arts as a gift to our city.

Overnight, two 18 foot long dancing creatures will appear on the Humber Bridge suspended 20 feet above the pedestrian walkway. The creatures will have a glass like appearance and at night they will seem to communicate with each other and their surroundings using bio-luminescence.

The City of Toronto staff and local councillors Mark Grimes and Sarah Doucette have paved the way to making such a large scale people driven project happen. Now we need your help!