Moving Images

In the summer of 2008, Quebec City became the site of the world's largest architectural projection: a 45-min long projection-mapped spectacle covering 400 years of settlement, development, and culture dating back to when the city was first founded as a French colony. For approximately 60 nights every summer, from 2008 until 2012, street lights were dimmed and people would gather on the docks, along the ramparts, or in hotel rooms around the city to witness an iconic building, the massive bunge grain silos in Quebec City's harbour, tell the story of this unesco world heritage site (UNESCO 2014). With each screening attracting about 10,000 spectators, Le Moulin à Images (The Image Mill) by director Robert Lepage and his team at Ex Machina (see Figure 2-1 and Figure 2-2) was seen by about half a million people every year (Dubé 2012, 187).

The Quartier des spectacles in Montreal represents another approach to the presentation of historical material in public space through large-scale projection. One particular installation, McLarena (2014) (see Figure 2-3), an interactive public projection commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, invited participants to mimic the choreography of the dancer that appears in renowned Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren's Canon (1964) in a mobile recording unit located in front of the projection.