instantplaces : citizen : toronto

The Junction festival invited us to create a generative video work entitled CITIZEN as part of the celebrations surrounding the 100th anniversary of the area. The presentation venue was a storefront window facing Dundas Street West, the main thoroughfare of the neighbourhood. Projections along the storefront window showed portrait transfigurations of Junction residents and business people.

After visiting businesses along Dundas Street to record the images, we built a software system to generate combinations of image sequences and distribute the generated transforms across the windows. In this work we made stylistic references to the history of portraiture over the last 100 years, from cubist refraction to 60’s era screen prints to the 20th century’s universal form of portrait-making, the snapshot.