Archive for September, 2012


So a lot of people have asked us, “Is SubZeroArts going to be doing something for Nuit Blanche Toronto this year?” And we’re afraid the answer is that we won’t be. But rest assured that we have lots of plans for 2013 and we hope that all of our friends in Toronto, Ottawa, and beyond will be able to enjoy them!  So keep in touch, okay?

Despite not having an installation in this year’s Toronto event, we’re still very excited to check out what’s happening around the city, and we encourage you all to do the same. Here are a few of the things we’re looking forward to;

Liquid Cohesion (Commerce Court Central Courtyard & Fountain, 25 King Street West):

We’re always interested to see how artists interpret and distinguish the lines between people and nature, and this unique video installation promises a new perspective that intrigues us.  Plus, y’know, elephants…

Civilization (Megaplex), 2010 by Marco Brambilla (Toronto City Hall Rotunda – 100 Queen Street West)

This display of looped video sounds promising, and appeals to our existential leanings…

Museum of the Rapture (Toronto City Hall underground parking garage, 100 Queen Street West)

Douglas Coupland has designed a unique installation experience that promises to be a fascinating study of how current society interacts and intersects with technology. It sounds pretty awesome!

“Cent une tueries de zombies” (The TIFF Bell Lightbox at 350 King Street West):

Really, who doesn’t love Zombies? Watch 101 Zombie death scenes in the comfort of the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Amidst all the horror you may figure out some survival tips that your predecessors didn’t and be <> much more prepared for the inevitable Zombie apocalypse…

Needless to say, these are just a few of the many pieces being exhibited around the city (you can see some more suggestions on the SubZeroArts tumblr page), and we encourage you to let us know what you’re interested in seeing.  Add us on Twitter (@SubZeroArts) and share your own Nuit Blanche Toronto experience with us!  We look forward to hearing from you!

Best wishes and good luck to all of the artists who are participating in tonight’s event!  Remember to keep hydrated and pace yourselves, it’s gonna be a long and awesome night…

Thank you Nuit Blanche Ottawa!

Congratulations Ottawa! What an amazing evening of arts and entertainment! SubZeroArts is honoured to have been part of your first Nuit Blanche and we are totally thrilled that so many visitors enjoyed LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!

LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!

We’d like to thank Megan, Lainie and Stefan of the Nuit Blanche team for inviting SubZeroArts to participate in this fantastic event, and Jason, Kathleen and everyone else at SAW Gallery for hosting us.

But most of all, we’d like to thank everybody that came out to take part in LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!, especially all of you that told your friends about us and then came back to show them that we really were as impressive as you said!

We designed LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! to be an environment created by everyone — an interactive experience that was as unique as the people that participated in it — and it was YOU that made it into such an awesome spectacle!

Thank you again. We have big plans and big ideas in store for you for 2013 and we hope that you’ll be there when they’re unveiled! Be sure to keep in touch with SubZeroArts by liking us on Facebook, or by adding us on Twitter, or by following our Tumblr.

All the best,
Rik and Deane of SubZeroArts
http://www.subzeroarts.com

P.S. SubZeroArts is 100% artist-funded, so if you’d like to support LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! with a monetary donation, we would gladly accept any contribution — large or small — with our utmost thanks and gratitude. Visit our donations page to find out more.

It won’t be long now…

Screens and projectors? Check!
Cameras? Check and Check!
Mac, firewire, cables and power bars packed? Check!
SubZeroArts homework printed out? Check!
SZA buttons made? (Eep, don’t tell Deane, but I haven’t started on those yet…)
Duct tape? Check and double check!

So the graphic test has been completed and all the gear is packed and ready to go. Today we bought a drill and 40 feet of copper wire, and we’re about as ready as we’ll ever be. We’ll be leaving Toronto tomorrow morning and we’ll be setting up Saturday afternoon in anticipation of Nuit Blanche Ottawa 2012 on Saturday night.

To say that we’re excited is an understatement, and we wanted to thank all of you for your support and encouragement and well wishes and donations and everything. We’re very lucky to have such an amazingly supportive group of friends and fans and followers, and we hope we’ll see a bunch of you at the SAW Gallery on Saturday night. And for those of you that can’t make it out, we’ll be sure to take lots of pictures and video and stuff so you can live the LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! experience vicariously through us!

BTW, it’s not too late to tell your friends about us, or to make a donation, or to ask them to like our facebook page or to follow us on Twitter!

Anyway, we probably won’t have much chance to update here between now and the event, but we’ll be live tweeting the whole experience on our twitter feed @subzeroarts using the hashtag #szanbo12. We hope you’ll follow along with us through the weekend.

We’d also like to thank the very kind people at Artengine who very thoughtfully mentioned LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! as being an installation of particular interest. We hope that we’ll not only live up to your expectations but surpass them!

Gotta run, those buttons aren’t going to make themselves…

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

It’s Alive!

There is a point in every project where you just don’t know if you can pull it together, where doubt starts to creep in and you just don’t know if you can do it.

multi-cam-test

We are happy to report that the picture above proves that we can pull it together. And it will be AWESOME!!!

One week tonight on September 22nd, LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! debuts at the Saw Gallery as part of Nuit Blanche Ottawa 2012. We hope you’ll be able to join us.

Still interested in helping us out behind the scenes?  Find out what you can do to help!

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, add us on Twitter @subzeroarts, or follow us on Tumblr to keep in touch with us!

 

Admittedly, the technical drawing in our last post may have only been exciting and/or interesting to ourselves, but we do believe that there’s some value in sharing it as it gives a glimpse behind the curtain (pardon the pun!) and shows how the magic is made.  And let’s face it, EVERYBODY wants to know how the magic is made…

LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! Final Floorplan

Today we have a slightly more involved technical drawing that gives you another view of things.  We hope you enjoy!

Still interested in helping us out behind the scenes?  Find out what you can do to help!

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, add us on Twitter @subzeroarts, or follow us on Tumblr to keep in touch with us!

 

 

There’s something very satisfying about seeing a completed technical drawing.

It makes things seem more real.

We have a few more drawings to share with you over the next few days, so be sure to check back and see LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! coming to life!

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who has been kind enough to support our project over the last few weeks. Whether you retweeted a message, or donated a few dollars, or liked us on Facebook, it’s all been really helpful, and very much appreciated! If you’d like to keep doing it we’d be very grateful, and if you’ve been meaning to help us out but haven’t figured out what to do we would happily direct you to our post “So What Can I Do to Help?“.

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, add us on Twitter @subzeroarts, or follow us on Tumblr to keep in touch with us!

 

Less than two weeks? Ack!

Today is Sunday September 9th, which means that Nuit Blanche Ottawa is less than two weeks away. Really? Can that be true? TWO WEEKS?!!?!?!?!!!?

SubZeroArts at Nuit Blanche Ottawa 2012

Ahem, yes, it’s less than two weeks until the debut of LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! and despite our apparent inability to read the calendar, things are moving along according to plan, we’ve been able to apply our newly-discovered knowledge of fabrics and pvc tubing, we’re on target with workplans, and we’re generally feeling pretty good about how everything is falling into place. So really, we’re not sweating or anything.

Well, maybe a little…

Anyway, in the time between other things we’ve started a SubZeroArts Tumblr account as we thought it would be a nice way to share all of the great art we’ve discovered looking through the Nuit Blanche Ottawa site with you, as well as posting other things of interest that we find as we poke around the internet. It seems like a really interesting community, and we encourage you to follow us there if you’re into the whole Tumblr scene. And if you can tell us what we’re doing wrong when we post music links we’d be most grateful…

We’d also like to take a minute to say thank you to everybody who’s acted on our “What Can I Do to Help?” post from last week, we really appreciate all of your support! If you haven’t had the chance to check out the post, it basically outlines how you can help us make LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! the best possible presentation that it can be, so, y’know, give it a look and let us know if there’s anything you can do to help.

Okay, gotta run, we still have 54,343,231 things left to do in the next two weeks, but we hope that you’ll keep in touch with us as we always enjoy hearing from you.  Talk soon!

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, add us on Twitter @subzeroarts, or follow us on Tumblr to keep in touch with us!

 

“So what can I do to help?”

We’ve been very pleased by all of your support for LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! over the last few weeks, and we’re very flattered to hear that you’re just as excited about it as we are!

Nuit Blanche Ottawa 2012

Now amidst all your excitement and comments and general interestedness, we’re seeing a recurring question coming up, and though it’s taken a few different forms, it ultimately translates to “So what can I do to help?”

And in some ways, that’s the coolest thing about doing an installation like this! It’s so cool that you (yes YOU!) want to be a part of it and make it happen!  That kind of interactivity is at the heart of everything we do as SubZeroArts, and we’re thrilled to have inspired you to do something even before we’ve shown you anything!

So in response to all of you who have asked “So what can I do to help?”, here’s a few things you can do for us that we’d really appreciate…

1) Help us spread the word!  Give us a signal boost!  Like us on Facebook!  Retweet some of our tweets!  Help us spread the word about LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!  Tell your friends about us, send them a link to our site, post a blog about us and let your readers know what we’re doing, hire a skywriting biplane to make a great big sign in the sky, make a post about SubZeroArts in your favorite community, or use your connections with Lady Gaga to ask her to tweet about us!  By letting people know about us, you’re increasing our broadcast range and increasing the support for our project, and that’s pretty cool, right?

2) Make a donation to SubZeroArts!  Okay, it sounds mercenary, but the truth is that it costs a lot of money to do something like this.  And admittedly we could use some help to upgrade some of our gear and buy some more equipment and ultimately make LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! the best possible installation we can.  We’ve set up a donations page on our website, and every donation we get will go towards making LIGHTSOUNDPLAY! into the  most  awesome installation it can be!

3) Get us in touch with more people!  Okay, this is slightly different from spreading the word.  This is our first project outside of our home base in Toronto, and we aren’t as well linked as we could be.  Maybe you know somebody in Ottawa that can help us spread the word, or maybe you have a friend that writes for an Ottawa event blog that might be interested in what we’re doing.  Maybe your brother lives in Ottawa and he can invite his curling team to drop by and see what we’re doing, or maybe your cousin’s book club would be interested in an outing to see LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!  Get them in touch with us so we can keep them in the loop too!

So there you have it, three simple things that you can do to be part of LIGHTSOUNDPLAY!   If you’re looking to be part of it, these are three ways that you can help us out and of course we’d be really grateful for your efforts.

So what can you do to help?

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, or add us on Twitter @subzeroarts to keep in touch with us!

 

Little beginnings

Tiny swaths of fabric. It’s hard to believe that these will sprout like magic, but they will…

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, or add us on Twitter @subzeroarts to keep in touch with us!

 

One of the most exciting aspects of being part of a large artistic event is the opportunity to discover other artists that you may not have heard of otherwise.  We’re really looking forward to seeing some of the other work that’s going to be presented at Nuit Blanche Ottawa 2012, and we’re very excited about making contact with other like-minded folks to talk to them about PVC tubing. But why wait until September 22nd to start looking around?  We thought we’d get the ball rolling by sharing some of the interesting things we’ve found browsing the NBO 2012 website, and let you know about what we’re interested to see…

Candy Chang - Before I Die...

Candy Chang is one of the other artists presenting her work at the SAW Gallery where our installation is being shown.  Her interactive piece Before I Die… encourages viewers to share their feelings with the world in a public setting.  We’ve always appreciated the idea of participatory art and the idea of blurring the lines between audience and involvement, and Candy’s work really captures that idea succinctly and effectively.  We’re quite looking forward to sharing a space with her!

Bright Smiles by Britta Evans Fenton and Darcy Whyte

We’re really looking forward to seeing Bright Smiles by Britta Evans Fenton and Darcy Whyte! As the audience walks into the space, their individual smiles will activate an array of glowing crystal on the ceiling, effectively proving “that a bright smile can light up a room“.  Presenting at M10 Artscourt (2 Daly Ave), Bright Smiles is a fascinating piece that we’re very excited to see.

Greta Grip Knitted QR Codes

We’re fascinated by the idea of Greta Grip’s hand knitted QR code display at Twiss & Weber (177 Armstrong Street).  The blend of technology and fibre art is most interesting and we can hardly wait to see it in progress!

We’ll let you know about some more of the installations and shows that will be part of NBO 2012 as we get closer to the actual night, but feel free to let us know about anything you come across that catches your eye, we’d love to hear about it!

Rik and Deane/SubZeroArts

PS  Like SubZeroArts on Facebook, or add us on Twitter @subzeroarts to keep in touch with us!

 

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