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 diverse 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 the 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.

Curator: Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Ithaca
Curatorial assistant: Charlie-Anne Côté, CCA
Digital content research: Camille Lavallée Prairie, Clara Rummer, Kioni Sasaki-Picou, Lutherking Asuru, CCA
Digital production research: Christopher Rouhi, Dallas
Software development: Salim Lounis, Montréal
Graphic design: House9, Montréal
Design development: Sébastien Larivière, Anh Truong

This project is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

The CCA would like to thank Lorne Gertner and Emily Masuda for their contribution to the digitization of the material presented in this exhibition.

The CCA would also like to acknowledge the essential support of the Government of Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.