Four must-see spectacles at Nuit Blanche 2014

Wondering which of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche’s 130 installations to cram into your art-themed all-nighter on Saturday, October 4? Here are four unmissable picks—one from each of the night’s exhibition zones. (Still overwhelmed? Just head to a Screaming Booth.)

Walk Among Worlds (pictured above)
Location: Ogden Junior Public School, 33 Phoebe St.
Zone: The possibility of everything

The world will be at Ogden Junior Public School on Nuit Blanche—quite literally. For Walk Among Worlds, by Mexico City–based Argentine artist Máximo Gonzáles, the school will be outfitted with 7,000 inflatable globes, one for every million people on the planet. The globes will be in three different sizes, as a way of representing the distinction between the first and third worlds.

Between Doors
Location: Fort York, 100 Garrison Rd.
Zone: Before Day Break

Nuit Blanche is expanding into Fort York this year, and Between Doors, an interactive installation from Toronto’s Labspace Studio, is making the most of the wide-open space. In this rumination on the nature of choice, participants will choose between a series of freestanding doorways, each of which leads to more doorways, and so on, while a large screen tracks and maps those choices overhead, revealing unexpected patterns and parallels.

2YouTopia
Location: Nathan Phillips Square Parking Lot, P1, 100 Queen St. W.
Zone: Performance Anxiety

Adapted from a 90-minute theatrical piece staged in 2013, Vertical City’s 2YouTopia will see a lone performer, Kiran Friesen, navigate a decaying maze of construction scaffolding and piping suspended over water in City Hall’s parking garage. “Abstract issues such as the nature of the imaginary world and the performer’s relationship to space have to be thoroughly revisited,” artistic director Bruce Barton says of the adaptation, “but so do very pragmatic issues such as exhaustion and bodily functions.”

8th Wonder
Location: Union Station Great Hall, 65 Front St. W.
Zone: The Night Circus

American artists Brian Kane and Michael Oatman aren’t revealing much about 8th Wonder, their “social sculpture” in Union Station’s Great Hall—which is why we’re so interested. There will be interactive, musical, performance, video and sculptural components, but we’re not still sure what the unrehearsed, not-to-be-repeated piece actually is. “It’s a beast of a sculpture,” Kane says in a promo video. “Let’s just say that.”