Here is a project you won't see on Interactive Architecture any time soon. The above image, aptly titled Blue Screen of Death was shot by Toronto photographer Sean Galbraith last November. It captured several large display screens on a downtown Toronto retail building in a rather vulnerable state. This is the side of media architecture that we don't see documented on design blogs as failures, glitches and malfunctions don't exactly reinforce the idea of building envelopes as a surface for a seamless media experience. There is something unnerving about error messages at an architectural scale - perhaps they are flickering reminders that even the city needs an occasional reboot. [via blogTO]

Last week I mentioned that I would be DJing at the launch event for FITC Toronto on Saturday April the 19th. FITC is a roving interactive and new media conference that hosts events in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Amsterdam, Winnipeg and Toronto, which serves as home base for the festival. FITC has been around for almost a decade and routinely features engaging rosters of speakers that include designers like Joshua Davis, Zachary Lieberman and Mario Klingemann discussing their work in Flash, Processing and in an increasingly broad range of platforms. Over the last few years as the idea of the "integrated audio visual performance" has propagated, more involved installation and performance type events have been featured in the FITC program. This year, DJ and production designer extraordinaire Tom Kuo will be using the launch event to premiere Superspace, an AV collaboration with video artist Markus Heckmann. [see previous post which mentions Markus's Wüstenarchitekten project].

The goal of Kuo and Heckmann's Superspace project is to increase the amount of interaction between DJ and VJ. Given that live video sometimes gets relegated to wallpaper status, I'm curious to see the methodology the pair have developed for this project. I'm quite familiar with the work of both these artists and am looking forward to seeing what they've cooked up. Over the past several years, Tom has done a lot for Toronto nightlife and raised the bar for production design and live video (most notably with his involvement in the Peter Mettler live cinema event at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006). I'm excited to see how these high standards will translate into a project explicitly bent on building bridges between VJ and DJ culture.

The FITC kickoff party will take place at the Burroughes Building at 639 Queen Street West this coming Saturday from 9pm to 2am. If you're on on the prowl for some stimulation next weekend, look no further. I'll definitely make a point of checking out their setup and following up with a post in the near future. Taking place earlier that evening, Pixel Gallery will be hosting a free talk by Evan Roth of the Graffiti Research Lab at 6pm at their Kensington Market location.