Canoeing the Black Creek

As an absurd gesture, myself and two of my colleagues (Risa Horowitz, and Alex Kurina) canoed the Black Creek in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Starting from a location near Jane Street and the 401, where the concrete embankments begin, we traversed this very urban waterway until the point where it merges with the Humber River (near Dundas Street and Royal York Road). Black Creek, like many other “lost” waterways in the Greater Toronto Area, has been drastically altered by humans: transformed from a natural watershed to a utilitarian and polluted concrete runoff basin.

For the duration of our 8-hour journey by canoe, I captured interval images of this Brutalist landscape that were later assembled into an intentionally rough and distorted 3D model through photogrammetry software. This produced a surreal, and unsettling digital model of this very unusual and historically complicated creek – and the video presented here depicts an extended traversal through that model.

Canoeing the Black Creek takes-on an experimental approach through playing with the inherent aesthetic nuances of photogrammetric processes, which are generally considered flaws and to be poor-quality results: holes, distortions, and an overall "goopy-ness" of the imagery/models.

Duration: 1:07:00

Format(s): 360 video (8000 x 4000px) or 2D 4K video (3840 x 2160px)