Parkades aren’t usually thought of as fun places, but now a plain old structure in downtown Victoria is home to a colourful – and musical – new art project.
The interactive piece allows people climbing the staircase to make music by simply touching the railings.
The project was unveiled at the Bastion Square Parkade on Yates Street Tuesday.
The city put out a call for the project last year. The goal was to make the parkades more welcoming and interesting.
“Whether you live here or whether you’re a visitor, I think when you experience things like this you get a sense of this is a city that is well-tended, it’s a city that’s creative and it’s a city that’s welcoming,” city councillor Pamela Madoff said.
The project was picked up by Monkey C Interactive, a company that creates interactive art in Victoria.
“We make a lot of interactive art projects for music festivals and things like that and we have for years. This is a variation of that, a more permanent version of one of the things we’ve installed previously,” co-creator Scott Amos told CTV News.
A unique aspect of the musical railings is that the beats can be adjusted.
“We’re going to update the music every once in a while so we can actually change all the sounds, it’s fully adaptable and updateable,” Amos added.
The Victoria company said the idea was sparked from a previous project.
“We thought well why don’t we propose something that’s like the Umbraphone, using photo resisters and shadow to create sound. We wanted to find a place to install it and we figured railings would be a good place,” co-creator David Parfit said.
The railings cost the city $10,000.
“The city gave us some funding for this, but for the most part we used a lot of our own resources to make this more interesting than it could’ve been,” Parfit noted.
There are two more parkade art projects in the works, at Centennial Square and one on Johnson Street that will launch in the fall.
