WHOOT! Aurora, Installation by Philip Beesley wins People's Choice Award in Nuit Blanche. Well deserved!

Attendance held steady at this year’s Nuit Blanche, and the all-night arts festival pumped tens of millions into the local economy, according to figures released by the city Tuesday.

A little under a million people came to the event, which saw 130 art installations set up across central Toronto on Oct. 2 and 3, the same as last year. Slightly more of those attendees came from out of town – 140,000, compared to 100,000 in 2009.

While the festival itself is free, the sheer number of people on the streets and out-of-town tourists were estimated to have generated $34.7-million in revenue for businesses, up from $18-million last year.

The city also announced the winners of this year’s Nuit Blanche Peoples’ Choice Awards. They included Aurora, a series of chain-mounted lights suspended in the atrium of the old Royal Conservatory of Music building, that lit up based on peoples’ movement; XXIX, where scores of speakers played 29 singers singing in different languages in the lobby of the Royal Ontario Museum; and Flux and Fire, a platform near Lamport Stadium that, using motion detectors, would spew forth three-metre-long columns of flame.

Curators are also accepting submissions for next year’s installment, the festival’s sixth. The deadline for submitting ideas for city-produced projects in Dec. 15, while those hoping to create independently-funded works have until Feb. 15.

via theglobeandmail.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales