For the all night long Nuit Blanche event at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto Ontario, we created a place for people to come, relax, sit down, and meet some new friends.

We wanted to evoke childhood forts and camping, letting people have a bit of agency as to how the space was used. And, we had the lights on a imperceptibly slow dimming timer.

A day/night cycle went from pretty bright to complete darkness and lasted approximately 9 minutes.

As the lights came back up, our guests often said good morning to each other. Depending on when people found their way into our space, the artscape around them either revealed itself or transformed.

As we suspected it might, this space had an inverse relationship with many other spaces open for Nuit Blanche, which were mostly crowded earlier in the night, with a lull around 2am or so. Our spaces true function revealed itself then, with everyone enjoying a place to sit, and play, and dance, with a built-in cycle for resting.  People related easily to the space saying things like “i loved building forts when i was little” to which one of us may have responded, “Yes, well, we build them professionally”