When the Toronto-York subway extension opened to great fanfare on Dec. 18, I, like many thousands of people that day, took advantage of the free ride and checked out the stations and the public artwork each contained.

Except at Pioneer Village Station, that is.

There, a massive, platform-long interactive art piece called LightSpell hung from the ceiling like “an undulating band of chandeliers” that could display text messages commuters typed at keyboard terminals throughout the station, but it wasn’t turned on as the TTC feared hate speech might appear on it.

In a statement, the Berlin-based artist collective realities:united said their $500,000 project was approved in 2009 and are calling this censorship, a contradiction to their “work’s core objective, which is to strike a balance between new digital possibilities of personal expression and the mechanisms of social control in public space.” If people saw a message they didn’t like in the station, it could easily be deleted or replaced by another message.

After eight years of planning, a last-minute halt to this work is embarrassing: if this was an issue the TTC should have flagged it years ago. Computer-driven public art pieces, especially interactive ones, can be tricky things for institutions whose main role isn’t art, and the TTC’s own record here is poor.

Share your thoughts

When the original Spadina line opened in 1978, Yorkdale Station included “Arc en Ciel” (rainbow in English), a light installation by Canadian artist Michael Hayden that pulsed as trains entered and left the station. Beloved by passengers, when it broke down in the ’90s the TTC decided not to repair it and it was removed, though there were reports last year it would be reinstalled with LED technology.

LightSpell’s ongoing maintenance is not yet an issue, but its potential content is. In 2018 this is an interesting debate: in many ways this work deeply respects the public’s ability to self-regulate in public space. Casting a shadow on this has been emboldened acts of hate speech of late.

Jan Edler, a member of the realities:united collective, says the TTC has offered a fix: a pre-approved “white list” of words that the public could choose from. This week he told me one of the interesting themes in this controversy is the tension between what he calls natural and technical systems.

“Today people have no real choice but to use technical systems for more and more things in life like communication, transportation, education and social relations,” says Edler. “This creates a problem, that many things making that shift from the natural to the technical are put under general suspicion and then under extended control.”

To illustrate, he explains in a natural system if somebody shouts “fire” in a theatre there are laws in place to deal with that. Same if somebody paints messages of hate on a building. However, add technology to the mix and Edler says there’s an increased urge, even a feeling of duty, to regulate the system beyond the laws already in place.

This is not the first time people have been able to project words or messages in public, and there are a few decades worth of projects that worked in public space such as this, some more technological than others. In 2002, “P2P: Power to the People” was installed on the façade of Kitchener City Hall for 10 days and in 2004 it was remounted on the Drake Hotel for a month. Created by Gorbet Design, an art collective based in Kitchener and Toronto, P2P was a marquee of 125 light bulbs controlled by 125 ordinary light switches mounted on a switchboard. People could flick a switch and light individual bulbs and create five to six letters.

“A key element of ‘P2P’ was if you could see it, you could change it,” says Matt Gorbet, one of the artists behind the work. He says it was very social as people would stand around and watch other people crafting letters or shapes. “It also wasn’t possible to send in messages remotely. People had to commit to standing in public flipping switches; they literally had to stand up for their convictions.”

Gorbet says there were conflicts at times, both political and profanity-based, but they had discussions with the City of Kitchener about their code of conduct. “Is it OK to run through the square with a bullhorn yelling profanities at the top of your lungs?” asks Gorbet. “If not, then it probably isn’t OK to post the F-word in giant letters. The remedy is to enforce the code of conduct for that individual and their message.” As with Airbnb or Uber, technology has disrupted a traditional, or “natural,” way of regulating behaviour.

Gorbet says the Pioneer Village station installation is quite beautiful but is different than their “P2P” project, which was temporary, and looked handmade rather than official and permanent. There was also more built-in accountability as it was also clear who was writing the message as it went up. With multiple input terminals, many subway commuters on the platform wouldn’t know who was controlling LightSpell.

“One of the most interesting questions we pondered was how it would be different now, in the age of social media,” says Gorbet of this ancient time before Twitter and Facebook. “We are not sure we’d be comfortable with people being able to write something explicitly provocative or hateful on this very visible and permanent sign and then photograph it and post it without context. When we saw the controversy around the realities:united piece, it immediately felt familiar.”

LightSpell is a striking installation, and a solution to this problem will take some further ingenuity to maintain the artistic integrity of this work. While the TTC is great at keeping 40-year-old streetcars running, I’m not sure I’d want them picking a list of acceptable words for an artwork. In one sense, this provocative piece is already a success because we’re talking about how technology and free speech in our new public realm works.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“One of the most interesting things that we found was that “P2P” wasn’t vandalized or tagged in the entire time it was up, in spite of its giant grey switchboard,” says Gorbet. “In Toronto, there was a tagger named Filth who tagged the bus shelter next to the piece but never tagged the switches, though we would go by [the Drake] on our way home at 2 a.m. and see FILTH up in the lights.”

How much trust can we put in our fellow commuters? Sometimes things just work out in a public space.

What if we just turned it on and see what happens?

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef