Curated Links | VISIBLE CITY project + archive

Neighbourhood Arts Network

Toronto’s first network dedicated to supporting art-making in neighbourhoods throughout the city. Part of the Creative City: Block by Block program of the Toronto Arts Foundation in partnership with Art Starts.

Logo Cities

Logo Cities is an ongoing research/creation project addressing signage, branding and lettering in public space, with a particular focus on the city of Montréal. Logo Cities is directed by Dr. Matt Soar, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University, and is made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. With considerable assistance from grad students Cecilia Chen, Grant Collins, AnneMarie Ennis, Lisa Gasior, and Michael Lithgow, plus my trusty research assistant Frances Millerd.

Archis

Archis is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity and action. The Archis Foundation comprises three departments: Archis Publishers, Archis Interventions and Archis Tools. For 75 years, Archis magazine and its predecessors have been investigating the realities of architecture. Archis has always asked the ultimate question to the raison d'être of architecture as a medium of culture: Why?

The TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide

The TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide is an online forum for Toronto riders to share tips on how to beat rush hour congestion, how to predict which platform the train will come into, and tips to pass the time during a disruption in subway service. While the site is more amusing than academic, it is interesting to consider the ways in which the public has come together over their love/hate relationship with Toronto’s Transit Commission. The site also features a gallery of local transit-related artwork, in addition to subway station maps and quirky facts. Overall, it’s an unorthodox mapping of Toronto’s subway routes.

[murmur]

[murmur] is a sound project displayed through signs dispersed in Kensington Market (Toronto) and westward. Through a mobile phone, participants may tune in to hear a story specific to the area they are standing in, and are invited to follow specific paths or freely wander through the space to engage with the experience of place. [murmur] restructures the idea of happenings within the city—stating that much more is happening away from landmarks and monuments. The project has also been launched in Vancouver and Montréal.

Arte/Citade

Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Arte/Citade is a urban interventions project that has been running since the mid-90s to aid in reconsideration of urban city space—specifically linked to power, economy and art. The project’s key concerns surround extensive urban planning research of the regions in Brazil, the selection of sites and the development of intervention projects. Currently they host four interventions.

South Asian Visual Arts Collective (SAVAC)

SAVAC is a Toronto-based, artist run, non-profit organization specifically geared towards the support of South Asian artists within Canadian and international contemporary visual art. The group aims to promote emerging artists, facilitate lectures, and organize exhibitions both in Canada and abroad. They have been recognized locally and internationally for their ambitious programs.

Upper Parkdale Benevolent Arts Guild

A Toronto-based artist collective that has created imaginary, cottony textile Soft Cities including participating in "The Centre Cannot Hold" exhibit of suburban fantasies at the Toronto Free Gallery.

Francis Alÿs

Born in Belgium, but currently living in Mexico City, Francis Alÿs’s art installations have been recognized around the world for their inventive take on the negotiation of city space. His projects include “Paradox of Praxis” (1997), where he pushed a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted, and, most recently, “When Faith Moves Mountains” (2002), in which 500 people at Ventanilla, outside Lima, Peru, formed a single line at the foot of a giant sand dune and moved it four inches using shovels.

CITY - The City Institute at York University

The City Institute at York University engages in leading-edge research and critical analysis of the city, in all of its parts and manifestations. In addition to contributing to the knowledge base of academics, policymakers and civil society, the Institute seeks to open new intellectual and political spaces in which counter-discourses may be created to challenge received wisdom as the city of the 21st century takes place.

Critical Mass

Bike riders unite in different cities worldwide not to block traffic, but to be an alternative form of traffic. These are unofficial websites of the international movement Critical Mass bicycle ride. The sites aim to document where every bike ride has taken place worldwide and they also house links to hundreds of Critical Mass sites around the world, and other catalogs.

A Toronto Psychogeography Society Blog

This curious blog documents a series of group walks throughout different sections of Toronto and the surrounding area. Recently recognized by The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Psychogeography Blog’s mission statement reads: “All that can be found anywhere can be found in Toronto -Victor Hugo, with some liberty and paraphrase.” The collective experiences of these walks are documented quite poetically on the blog, revealing the emotional or ephemeral experience of these jaunts around some of Toronto’s most scenic destinations.

World Soundscape Project

The World Soundscape Project was established by R. Murray Schafer at Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The project’s aim was to document and research the sound ecology of modern cities with their rapidly changing soundscapes—and more specifically, the rise in noise pollution. This work resulted in two small educational booklets, The New Soundscape and The Book of Noise, plus a collection of Canadian noise bylaws. However negative the approach, it fostered Schafer’s essay “The Music of the Environment,” in which he describes examples of acoustic design, good and bad, drawing largely on examples from literature.

Networked Cultures

Networked Cultures investigates the cultural transformations under way in Europe through examining the potentials and effects of networked spatial practices. Based at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the project collaborates with art, architectural and urban practices across Europe and beyond to look at ways in which contested spaces allow for a multi-inhabitation of territories and narratives across cultural, social or geographic boundaries. Sites of alternative urban engagement are collected on a database and will be presented in a variety of formats, including exhibitions, films and books.

Reading Toronto

Reading Toronto looks at the city through the eyes of many of its most creative artists and arts institutions. The growing ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections allows visitors from around the globe to experience the city in ways never before possible. More than that, they can contribute their own stories, experiences, and ideas about Toronto. As descriptions of the city accumulate, we expect that new ways of reading Toronto will emerge.

Torontoist

Torontoist is a website about Toronto. Has paid advertising but has plenty of original content about the city.

Celery Magazine

A new online magazine for the “rejuvenation” of the art and culture of Toronto.

Spacing Magazine

An innovative Toronto-based magazine aimed at kindling a new civic pride in Toronto. Spacing tracks community-based projects, commercial developments, and is also responsible for the ever-growing popularity of Toronto subway stop buttons, which are being seen on lapels and back packs throughout the GTA. "The civic pride fashion statement of the year." - National Post, January 15, 2005.

Streets are for People!

A blog by a group of Toronto-based activists whose purpose is to start the "hilarious revolution: holding parties in reclaimed parking spots, parading on main streets, and occupying road construction sites to host concerts, games, and socials." Streets are for People! is behind projects such as Pedestrian Sundays and Blackout Anniversary street parties.