Designers of controversial street light art project explain their vision
The negative reaction to the cluster of 36 street lights on 10 poles will fade now that the colourful lights are on, the designers say

Thestar.com
July 30, 2014
By Brian Platt

By day, it’s a mysterious - some say garish - cluster of 36 street lights adorned on 10 utility poles. When the sun sets, the colourful LED lights come on, casting glows of blue and green on the sidewalk below.

The public art project, known as Nyctophilia, or love of the night, is set to be officially unveiled Wednesday night. In June, when the poles went up at the corner of Weston Rd. and Dennis Ave., it sparked a flurry of negative comments to the Star and other media outlets.

The project cost $250,000, with most of it coming from the city’s levy on developers that comes in exchange for zoning exemptions.

The Star spoke with its two designers, Christian Giroux, a fine arts professor at the University of Guelph, and Daniel Young, a Toronto-based visual artist.

Why did you use a collection of street lights?

CG: Given that it was a working-class neighbourhood where at one time there was much more industrial activity and now it’s trying to bounce back, we wanted to work with normal, everyday pieces of urban infrastructure. Take something that’s kind of invisible and turn it into something extraordinary.

DY: It’s not completely crazy in terms of its configuration, but it’s not completely regular. It’s kind of liminal, in between what you would recognize as art and design. We spent a lot of time on the composition.

There was quite a bit of negative reaction when you first built this. Were you expecting that?

CG: We did get a lot of initial negative reaction, and it’s funny because, these light poles, we literally exist in a grid of a million of them. They are around us everywhere all the time.

When in the process of putting in poles, we had some of our most passionate arguments with passersby at that stage. One man’s opening position, when he saw these concrete poles going into the ground, was that it was “Disgusting!” And we managed to get him from “It’s disgusting!” to “It’s perfectly fine, but it should be down on the waterfront, where more people see it.”

DY: There was this assumption it was going to be the brightest street corner in all the world. In some ways, that press and that assumption was a perfect lead-up to the turning-on of the artwork, and all these very gentle LED lights.

Do you think people have a different reaction to it at night, when it’s lit up, than during the day?

DY: Yes, absolutely. I was photographing it the other night, and I saw about 10 people actually stop their car to get a photo of it. There’s a romanticism about coloured lights in the city. And we’re programming this with a sort of personality, so it performs different ways at different times.

After the sun goes down, you’ll see the artwork as a composition of colour. At other times, it’s a composition of concrete poles and light stands, and just like all of the hydro poles and street lights are during the day, they’re useless.

One comment we heard was that expensive public art projects like this are what drive people to vote for Rob Ford, that populist urge. What’s your response to that?

CG: Sure, it’s the easiest thing in the world to walk down the street and find someone who says “I don’t understand this” or “Why did this cost so much money?” But the real argument is one that’s waged over time. And I think the way people relate to it is going to change those arguments.

DY: My reaction is that visual art isn’t just for downtown Toronto. Culture should be evenly distributed.