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Terminally bored? You won't be, with digital art
Five works that riff on airport signage, architecture and travel liven up wait times at Terminal 1
NADJA SAYEJ
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 14, 2007
'What is this?" asks Jerry Laehi, furrowing his brow at an arrivals and departures sign at Pearson International Airport. Instead of showing which gate his flight to Vancouver departs from, the times and locations gale around the screen like a tornado of alphabet soup.
The sign isn't broken - it's a work of digital art by New York-based artist Daniel Shiffman. Along withfour other works that riff on airport signage, architecture and travel, the piece is part of an unconventional art show that opened this month in Terminal 1, and attempts to stop jet-lagged travellers in their sleepwalking tracks.
"How clever," says Mr. Laehi, 60, a consultant from Athens, after clueing in. "It really catches you off guard, but I like it. For some of us, it might be the only art we experience."
Presented by the Toronto-based Year Zero One digital-art collective, the idea was sparked in 2005 when co-curator Michael Alstad, 42, found himself stranded in dull airports on business trips in Europe. "I noticed that a lot of airports' art is static, but a better metaphor for the constant coming and going of people is digital work," he says while plugging in wires to Mr. Shiffman's screen.
After getting the green light from Lee Petrie, Pearson Airport's manager of cultural programming this January, Mr. Alstad and David Jhave Johnston, 42, chose five digital works from a call of 90 submissions to reflect the new terminal that opened this January.
The Touch and Go collective is showing short slapstick films that follow the iconic stick man taking some time off from the bathroom wall (in one, he heads down to the bar for a martini; in another, he jousts with an umbrella).
A few other works fall into the "generative art" category, a kind of digital art that brings live data feed (such as weather patterns or plane-departure schedules) to light. One is Karen Thornton's piece, ETA, an outgoing-flight detector that shows a bird's-eye view of the Toronto runways planes will land on. And Erik Adigard and Chris Salter's walk through the Terminal 1 rendition in Second Life is another (though a 10-year-old boy managed to crash it when he sent the character to an off-the-map terrain - a technician had to be called in to get the program back up and running).
Passage Oublié by Montreal-based artist Maroussia Lévesque, 24, invites passengers to text-message their thoughts on terrorism and rendition flights, which are then posted on an online map. "I get racial profiled all the time in airports," wrote one traveller, while another noted, "I don't want to think about this kind of thing before boarding a plane."
Though it makes some passengers nervous, the project is important to Paul Onwubuke, a 42-year-old screening officer. "It's not the kind of art someone will ask to be photographed in front of, that's for sure," he says. "But people need to know that terrorism is real."
Though Ms. Petrie, 37, hasn't seen the exhibition yet, she thinks digital art is the next necessary step for airport art. "I am committed to offering challenging art," she says. "Not everything has to be so lightweight."