news For The Good Of All Of Us





Photos (top, and bottom) by wvs from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The whole wide internet is getting crushes on it, so it’s about time we wrote about Posterchild’s brand new Bloor Street project: a portal!

Posterchild—who, full disclosure, publishes Vandalist here every Friday—likes video games: his Super Mario question blocks from 2005 (which are pretty much exactly what they sound like) drew imitators and attention worldwide, most notably in Raveena, Ohio, where police called in a bomb squad after five teenaged girls made some blocks of their own and placed them around the city.

So here we are, three years later, with two matching pieces far more likely to confuse people unfamiliar with video games: a Weighted Companion Cube stuck in a portal, straight out of the video game Portal. The first installation—or rather, the first half—is up on Bloor by Euclid (pictured above, at top); the second is up on Yonge by Bloor (above, at bottom). The two parts of the portal are “doorways in space,” explained Posterchild, and the idea is that you can teleport the two and a half kilometres between them. Stuck in between them is a Weighted Companion Cubes, objects which “are tricky to explain if you haven’t played Portal,” Posterchild told us. According to Wikipedia, they’re “a waist-high crate with pink hearts on each face” and “can be used to depress large buttons to open doors or activate platforms,” and they have some kind of weird cult following. So…yeah! Posterchild admitted it’s “maybe best to just call it an in joke?”

Both halves of the were put up last Sunday, March 16, and, at last check, both were still up. Catch them while you can—even if you don’t really totally get it, it’ll be hard to overstate your satisfaction. In the interim, Posterchild was nice enough to send us two exclusive photos of the pieces being installed, after the fold.





