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festival

Crossings, an installation from New York's OpenEnded Group.Margaret Kaise

Find giant, inflatable clown heads in alleyways, take in a human puppet show and watch Yonge-Dundas Square set on fire. It's all part of the organized chaos that is Scotiabank's Nuit Blanche.

The "all-night contemporary art thing" announced its roster Wednesday for the fifth-annual Toronto event. On Oct. 2, the city of neighbourhoods will be redrawn into exhibition zones for insomniacs and art lovers with stamina.

This year, city-produced exhibits will be set along the Yonge-University subway line to satisfy the perennial complaint: It's impossible to see everything. This change should make the 133 projects (40 city-produced and 93 community-produced) easier to navigate over the art fest's 12-hour duration.

In Zone A, curator Gerald McMaster's exhibition, titled The Good Night, features 10 projects in and around Yorkville, from Yonge Street to St. George Street.

A gravity-defying light show will be projected onto the Royal Ontario Museum's Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, featuring images of the foot traffic below, in Crossings, an installation from New York's The OpenEnded Group.

The Holt Renfrew Centre becomes the canvas for a giant projection of smiling faces, accompanied by music written by Charlie Chaplin in Monument to Smile, from Parisian artist Agnès Winter.

Zone B is split in half, with Anthony Kiendl curating seven exhibits on the west side of Yonge Street, from College Street to Queen Street in Sound and Vision. Dave Dyment's sound installation Day for Night slows a 90-minute rock musical down to a lethargic pace, playing for 12 straight hours. Mark Laliberte stages a human puppet show set to electronic music in False Kraftwerk. Both artists are from Toronto.

In The Night of Future Past, eight projects curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan will be on the east side of Yonge, from Carlton Street to Queen Street. British artist Ryan Gander will set Yonge-Dundas Square ablaze in his piece Just Because You Can Feel It, Doesn't Mean It's There. The fire burns from sundown to sun-up; an accompanying print cartoon will help explain the cause.

Reunion, a group exhibit, will revisit the 1968 artistic convergence of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage in which a chess match determined the room's acoustics.

Visitors will be invited to change the flight pattern of LED-lit fireflies in the middle of the city at Ning Ning, an interactive multimedia installation by Vancouver- and Brooklyn-based artist Karen Garrett de Luna.

In Zone C, Christof Migone will curate 15 projects in the financial district, straddling Yonge Street from Queen Street to Front Street, in Should I Stay or Should I Go.

Auto Lamp is a kind of landlocked lighthouse in the form of an interior-lit 1996 Dodge Ram, punctured with holes by Toronto artist Kim Adams. Sandra Rechico's installation 1850, 2010 bathes the now-concrete Front Street in blue light, re-creating the shoreline as it appeared before it was developed, by immersing it in "water."

Giant clown heads will be stuck in alleyways between buildings, as part of Max Streicher's Endgame (Coulrophobia), withcharacters that could be deemed funny or fiendish.

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