One of the more fascinating artistic installations at 2024’s Nuit Blanche will be “Love Across Distance,” which uses interactive light effects to explore the nature of queer, long-distance relationships. It will be happening in front of The ArQuives at 34 Isabella Street from dusk until dawn on Saturday, October 5-6. The two artists who collaborated to make this work, Jordan King and Nathan Bruce, followed very different artistic paths to reach this point.
Jordan’s journey has been all about performance, and it is only since she met Nathan that she has introduced interactive elements into her work, including a recent, autobiographical, hour-long, one-woman show on which they collaborated. Nathan started university studying theatre production but soon expanded into editing, animation, lighting and projection design, interactive tech and generative art—art that has an aspect of non-human autonomy in its creation, execution, and/or result. They met in the second half of 2023, at Charles St. Video, where Nathan was presenting the prototypes of two interactive pieces. They immediately began to talk about how they could work together.
The following interview is an edited version of their responses to a series of questions posed by The ArQuives team.
What led you to become an artist?
Nathan
I’ve always had some sort of involvement in the arts since I started playing music at 6, so I think it’s only natural I would end up being an artist. My entire childhood and adolescence in Vancouver was absorbed in music and performance. But it wasn’t until I went to theatre school in Toronto that I discovered the magic of how a play came together from behind the scenes. Lighting fascinated me, how it contours the body and reveals spaces in infinite ways, how the movement of light tells a story. But it was a couple of festivals in 2022 that really pushed me to pursue this interactive practice. It was something about how openly the art could be enjoyed at these festivals without being behind ticketed doors that just spoke to me. I think the common ground between public art and theatre is the communal enjoyment of the art—but the twist with what we’re doing with the Nuit Blanche project is that the audience becomes part of the art and not simply a viewer of it.
Jordan
A creative force is just within me, really, and sometimes I think life would be easier if I didn’t have quite so much energy and creative drive . . . Ha! Growing up I was drawn to theatre; I sketched obsessively; as a teenager I made or re-designed a lot of my own clothes. I’ve worked in a number of creative capacities; my first real job was at an independent boutique in Vancouver where I helped out the on-set stylists who borrowed clothes for commercials or film shoots. Meanwhile, at night my friends and I spent hours getting ready to go to nightclubs; for our performances, for fashion events, we were sort of living art. I then thought I should do something a bit more . . . long-term, so I worked as a makeup artist for fifteen years, which included time in New York from 2017-2020. I assisted someone quite high profile there, an experience that profoundly shaped my artistic sensibility. Since 2020, I’ve sought to continue exploring, creating, and working in a focused, disciplined, and elevated way.
Please describe “Love Across Distance,” the installation, how it works and what you hope the audience will get out of it.
Jordan
The installation will engage the visitor at two plinths in front of the ArQuives (at the entry point to the concrete walkway). These plinths will be connected to two projectors inside the second-floor galleries of the house, which will be aimed toward the windows so that the projections are visible from the street below. (The projectors will each be activated at the plinths by a visitor moving their hands around.) Thus visitors will be able to “animate” the projections. The idea of distance will be conveyed by how far away the windows are, by the interactive element, by the sense of wanting to feel or connect, despite the inability to do so physically.
There will be a very subtle sound element, a low-volume soundscape intended to encourage visitors to consider life for queer people in different parts of Canada. The soundscape consists of various auditory textures I’ve collected across Canada, recorded outdoors, in natural or urban environments. I hope visitors can imagine sensations of longing and consider what people really feel, when technology is the only way to see someone you are hoping to experience a romantic connection with across great geographic distance.
Nathan
There’s no physical touch involved in the piece. A small camera is mounted on top of each of the plinths, and you activate the visuals by waving your hands above them. It’s sort of like “the force” in Star Wars, where nothing is physically touched when it’s employed, but an invisible energy conveys the intention. The interactive component of the installation is made up of three pieces: a LeapMotion controller, TouchDesigner (a computer application), and a projector. LeapMotions are small infrared cameras that emit invisible lasers; they hit an object, then reflect back into the lens, allowing the viewer to know where an object, say a hand, is in three-dimensional space. Manipulating the LeapMotion camera is how an individual interacts with “Love Across Distance.” The co-ordinates of the hand are fed into a computer running TouchDesigner, allowing you to move and stretch the image. The visuals are then mapped and projected to fit only into the frame of a window.
The installation uses digital means to convey the experience of love across distance. The projections seen in the windows juxtapose organic with geometric forms representing love and emotion contextualized within a digital landscape. That is, individual dots come together to loosely represent something that may be water. They flow in non-rigid patterns, expand randomly to occupy the space they’re in, never repeat their previous instance. How we interpret all the digital information as love and re-contextualize it to be love, that’s the magic we hope to create.
I think it’s important to note that the one physical aspect of the piece – the action of moving your hand around – does take a certain amount of energy. As someone who was in a long distance relationship for a while, I can tell you that there is quite a bit of energy that goes into maintaining one.
What’s the right frame of mind for experiencing “Love Across Distance”?
Nathan
Just allow yourself to explore how any possible movement affects the visuals. You can think of it as being a conversation you’re having with the piece. You make a gesture and it responds. How do you react to that? How does it make you feel? I find you can enter a very Zen-like state with this approach. In a way, you become one with the work!
Jordan
I hope visitors can immerse themselves in the experience, from the place it’s happening to the various senses—sight, sound, touch—with which they will engage. I hope visitors will also understand these elements as part of the challenge often faced in long-distance love affairs.
The installation can be viewed between October 5, 7:00 pm and October 6, 7:00 am at The ArQuives, 34 Isabella Street, Toronto, Ontario M4Y 1N1 Canada. Visit the event page.
Author bio: Rick Archbold has worked as a writer and editor in Canadian book publishing for many years. He is the author or co-author of numerous non-fiction books, including A Flag for Canada, an illustrated biography of the Canadian flag. He lives in Toronto with his partner of more than 40 years.