PED.Toronto
Continuing an exploration of urban history initiated during its Off-Site series, the Koffler Gallery invites audiences to venture outside the white cube with a summer project developed by the PED Collective.
Including Canadian artists Millie Chen and Warren Quigley and Americans Andrew Johnson, Joan Linder and Paul Vanouse, PED describes itself as “a full service organization slated to inform, entertain and educate” through a range of site-specific, audio bicycle tours designed to reveal layers of a city’s life. PED.Toronto also includes honorary member David Dressner.
PED re-imagines and transforms our experiences of familiar streetscapes, engaging a spectrum of professional and amateur narrators to populate audio tracks delivered via bicycle-mounted speakers. PED’s past projects mined the geographies and civic narratives of Buffalo, NY (USA), Belfast (Northern Ireland), Chongqing (China), Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and St. John’s, NL (Canada).
For PED.Toronto, the collective has created a series of bike tours through Toronto’s West Queen West area that examine the city’s shifting identities, multi-faceted realities and imagined potentials:
- Toronto the Good incorporates literary and filmic references revealing this city as a place rich in its own stories as well as a cinematic stand-in for other cities.
- Toronto the Better focuses on the current streetscape and local culture of the sites, start-ups, outreach organizations, businesses and personalities around the Koffler Gallery neighbourhood.
- Toronto the Best offers riders a transformative experience, channelling science fiction into a call to action for Toronto residents, whether they are long-time, new or even yet unforeseen citizens.
Converted into the PED Station and Museum, the Koffler Gallery serves as a bicycle terminal and information hub. Bike tours are available to anyone wishing to ride; bicycles are borrowed and returned free of charge.
Multimedia displays featuring a retrospective of past PED projects and a live feed observation centre will extend the outdoor experience and interactive engagement with the city, sparking both our subjective and collective imaginations.
