Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994

Culture Lab was a multidisciplinary symposium series initiated and directed by Brian Boigon that ran from 1991 to 1994. Held in the back of a club in Toronto, each of the twelve iterations of the program prompted guests from broad fields of cultural production to engage with a theme anchored in the history and theory of the digital. For Boigon, this was a novel format elaborated to study the world of space, architecture, and form through the lens of other disciplines.

Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994 proposes an understanding of the Culture Lab as a medium in its own right: a form of interactive entertainment that operates through liveness and staged conditions for participation, eliciting specific behaviours from participants. As evidenced by materials in the Brian Boigon fonds at the CCA, these principles also structured Boigon’s broader practice as an artist, data architect, and design theorist. The exhibition centres on Culture Lab, presenting previously unseen video recordings in an accelerated, thirty-six-channel display that fragments and recomposes the symposium’s architecture. The symposia are contextualized alongside other projects—Cartoon Regulators, SpillVille, Splinters, and Speed Reading Tokyo—to demonstrate the multiple modalities through which Boigon approached the design of interactive media.

The CCA presents the Culture Lab as a study that reconsiders the emergence of digital technologies in cultural and architectural production at the turn of the millennium.