Dancing with Buildings

You put your left foot in, you take your left foot out. And yes, you shake it all about as prompted by the screen in front of you. Soon enough your recorded image is projected for all of the people gathered around the Place Des Arts metro station in downtown Montreal who seem to be performing their own dance of spectatorship, watching intently or distractedly, snapping photos to post online, and cueing up for their turn.

If you did any of these things, you would have just participated in McLarena (2014), the interactive public artwork by the Montreal design firm Daily tous les jours that I described in Chapter 2, a work that pays homage to Canadian film pioneer Norman McLaren's work Cannon (1964) by teaching people to dance like the character in his film and displaying the results on the side of a building for everyone to see. As buildings become more like screens with the addition of projection, LEDS, or built-in screen elements, we will increasingly find ourselves amongst public artworks and experiences like this in our cities — works that are large-scale, public, networked, interactive, participatory, and digital. In fact, McLarena shows us that what we now expect from public space, and what it can potentially deliver, is rapidly changing.