Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

Writer: Monica Valencia 

Imagine playing a tag-like game in downtown Toronto with a large crowd of people, attending a costume party in the subway, or even participating in a massive bubble battle on the street. Organizing activities such as these, which transform the city into a giant and surreal playground, is the goal of Newmindspace, an organization that creates and hosts free events that promote interactive, public art.

Newmindspace was initiated in 2005 when Kevin Bracken and Lori Kufner, two University of Toronto students, introduced their first activity, an urban Easter egg hunt. Since then, many events have been organized to transmit a public space message. Bracken explains that they want to inspire other cities with the living art installations to decorate their streets with people rather than with still objects. He continues that the purpose of the events is to transport people away from reality and to make something surreal, and almost magical, happen in urban centers.

The activities run by Newmindspace include: Capture the Flag, subway and streetcar parties, pillow fights, Easter egg hunts, and street illuminations. Events gather an average of 300 to 400 people, with the majority of attendees being in their twenties. However, all ages can take part in the games and many children and seniors attend as well. “We have one event per month,” said Bracken, “[and] each event has a different motive behind [it].”

The events bring people from all over the city together for a fun-filled experience. In the pillow fight, participants wear costumes and swing their funky pillows at other participants in downtown Toronto. For the Easter egg hunt, 3,000 to 5,000 plastic eggs containing friendly messages are hidden across the streets of Toronto and found the following day. The street illuminations event allows people to decorate the city with magnetic lights, which brighten up the city for up to two weeks. Another activity that involves lights is nightlights, an event where the objective is to create an original star constellation with strings of LED lights that are suspended from helium balloons. The glitter produced by the floating lights can be seen from many miles away.

The Newmindspace subway parties are filled with people in fairy-tale costumes who sprinkle glitter, play music, and exchange gifts with new friends. In the Capture the Flag event, two teams compete against one another and try to collect their opponent’s flag by going into the enemy’s territory. The players bike, roller blade, and run when trying to score. Additional events include Snow Day, Jingle Bell Rock, and Flight of Fancy.

The way that the city is lit up and the liveliness that the participants bring to Toronto has inspired similar events in Montreal, Vancouver, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, and various locations in Europe and Asia. The interest is so great that Bracken and Kufner have compiled a list of guidelines entitled Metromorphosis or “city transformation” to help citizens of other cities plan these types of events. “Everyday we get e-mails on how to do what we are doing in other cities, so we created a guide, and now some of the events [are run] worldwide,” says Bracken. Metromorphosis is posted on the organization’s website, and its founders are even thinking of turning it into a printed book.

Designer: Michelle Leung