Nuit Blanche will light up night Oct. 2

Options for insomniacs on Oct. 2: complete one of General Idea’s Orgasm Energy Charts from 1970; celebrate the birthdays of total strangers; watch two pianists play Vexations 420 times each over 12 hours.

U of T artists and curators are staging exhibitions across all three zones of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche this year. The event — which draws thousands of people onto the city streets from sunrise to sundown in search of art — will involve students, staff, faculty and alumni.

“It’s a huge logistical undertaking,” said UTM Blackwood Gallery director Christof Migone, curator of the Zone C exhibition in the financial district. “The sheer number of performers, the scale, is very challenging.”

Migone commissioned 10 projects and selected another five from an open call for submissions for the exhibition he titled Should I Stay or Should I Go?

“That’s a fairly well known song by the Clash but it is also very much a concrete and immediate reaction to past Nuit Blanches where you are confronted with a lineup and you have to decide are you going to line up and stay or should you just go,” Migone said. “It can also be seen in relevance to other facets of life — should you stay in this job or should you go? Should you stay in school, in this relationship? That moment of decision is really critical.”

Live performances include Erik Satie’s Vexations (1893), in which pianists in Brookfield Place will play the same piece of music 840 times. Each time a pianist plays through the score, it will be folded “like a little origami sculpture” and displayed so that passersby have a visual sense of how far along the performance is, Migone said.

In Zone B, spectators can join in the iconic ritual of singing Happy Birthday while watching celebrants at an outdoor table blow out candles and munch on cake. Fifteen minutes later, they can sing along with a new party of revellers. Happy Birthday to___________! (sic) is the creation of Jennifer Davis, a graduate student at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, and Vesna Jocic, a recent grad (for information on how to participate go to www.happybirthdayto.ca).

“We all have a birthday but this moment usually happens in your living room or your backyard, so taking it out of that context and placing this personal event in a city-wide event seemed really interesting,” said Davis.

In Zone A, the University of Toronto Art Centre and Hart House will revisit seminal works of conceptual art with a focus on measurement. One exhibit at UTAC consists of a room papered with recently completed Orgasm Energy Charts, a concept devised by the renowned art collective General Idea more than 35 years ago. Among the exhibits featured at Hart House is a version of the 1999 exhibit 1,000,000 Pennies by conceptual artist Gerald Ferguson, who died in 2009.

Hart House will also be the site of a new work by Danish artist Jens Haaning. Commissioned for Nuit Blanche, the installation will comprise national flags representing students’ countries of origin.