Exhibited at Nuit Blanche 2012 in a public plaza nestled between Toronto’s financial district bank towers, Michael Alstad’s Liquid Cohesion transformed a water feature into a utopian aquatic playground through a choreographed interactive video projection. Uniting human and marine life, the work was projected from an office tower down onto a shallow circular pool surface creating an open-ended virtual aquarium. The site-specific video projection infused a colourful and random whirlwind of nature as a counterpoint to the stark simplicity of the geometrically defined modernist courtyard. Participants movement along the video projection’s perimeter activated an animation layer suggesting fish swarm behavior and emergent patterns in nature. Performers walked through the water and interacted with the projection elements through the use of video motion tracking.
