Drake Hotel, Toronto
April 9 and 10, 2005

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
—Italo Calvino

Global media have opened up a multitude of channels for the flow of information and capital across time and space. The circulation of art takes place both through these new circuits and outside them in the material environments of cities. Artists, architects and designers look to the city to bring specificity and sensuality to the ephemeral environments they are creating at the intersections of technology, communication and aesthetics. This connection to everyday life, to a sense of place and history, positions artists as aesthetic innovators and political instigators who use local environments to transcend the borders of cities and create new forms of democratic expression.

Urban Interventions: A Symposium on Art and the City brings together critical theorists, filmmakers, visual artists, architects and designers who use visual culture to investigate, document and describe this changing relationship between art and citizenship.

Urban Interventions is produced under the auspices of the Visible City Project + Archive directed by Janine Marchessault at York University.