February 26–August 30, 2026
Montréal Québec H3H 2S6
Canada
This week, we step into the smoky back room of Toronto’s Rivoli rock club on Queen Street West in the early 1990s, when animation studios, artist-run galleries, cable television, and live events reshaped the street into a vibrant media corridor. Within this environment, architect Brian Boigon staged a radical reformatting: Culture Lab, a twelve-part symposium series held from 1991 to 1994. Culture Lab brought architects, philosophers, artists, science fiction writers, and theorists together under stage lights and disco balls—not to lecture, but to perform. Seated onstage with drinks in hand and surrounded by a rowdy crowd, participants including Atom Egoyan, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosalind Krauss, Sanford Kwinter, Bruce Sterling, Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, and Liz Diller addressed cyberspace, suburbia, subjectivity, image culture, and digital desire at a moment when analogue media were giving way to networked computation. This was, in Boigon’s words, “fast talk for smart people,” where entertainment became epistemology—a form built on timing, atmosphere, and engagement. In today’s world of podcasts, streams, and infinite scroll, that format has fractured. Smart talk is now packaged for fast people.
For Boigon, Culture Lab was itself a medium, situated at the convergence of the telephone, television, and computer—what he described as interactive entertainment. It operated through liveness, staging conditions for participation that elicited and anticipated behaviour. These principles also structured his broader practice, from children’s television to computer-generated worlds. Through B.B. Studios, Boigon collaborated with companies such as Alias Research to produce 3D animation, live-action footage, and early web platforms that pioneered interactive and crowdsourced content. Projects including Splinters, SpillVille, and Ketchup combined satire, character design, and digital motion, extending these techniques across media formats. Boigon’s architecture functions as a temporal and social system in which interoperability across disciplines, technologies, and aesthetics generates new cultural forms.
Curated by Farzin Lotfi-Jam and drawn from the Brian Boigon fonds at the CCA, the exhibition Interactive Entertainment Architecture: Culture Lab, Toronto 1991–1994 presents previously unseen Culture Lab video recordings through an accelerated, thirty-six-channel display that fragments and recomposes the symposium’s architecture, compressing long durations while inviting close viewing, alongside related projects. The installation reconsiders what it meant—and continues to mean—to design media as animate form, asking how the Queen Street West scene can reframe the history of the digital in architecture as a situated, interactive practice.
At a moment when new modes of image-making are transforming architectural representation and the investigation of the real, the project returns to the turn of the millennium to examine the emergence of digital technologies in cultural production.
Find out more about how the nightclub redefined the notion of the symposium, in the article we published this week, featuring an edited transcription of a video interview with Brian Boigon.
This project is generously supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. We thank Lorne Gertner and Emily Masuda for their contribution to the digitization of the material presented in this exhibition, and would like to acknowledge the essential support of the Government of Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal.
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