Toronto’s digiPlaySpace remains a delightful anomaly in Canadian arts and entertainment programming; an offshoot of the Toronto International Film Festival’s TIFF Kids Film festival, each spring it transforms the HSBC Gallery at the TIFF Lightbox into an interactive playground for children. While we’ve provided an overview of past programs in their entirety here on CAN, this year our attention was caught by a particular project—one that we wanted to delve into in some detail.de

Forest invites kids and adults alike to engage with a giant tactile colour mixer, with ‘spinner’ controls distributed across a 7 x 2 grid of custom-fabricated MDF panels. Elegantly blending hardware and software design, the piece is an evocative luminous forest that enables collaborative interaction and exploration. While the installation is very much a crystallization of San Francisco-based creative technologist Micah Scott’s LED mastery and the interests at play within her practice, focusing this profile squarely on her role in mounting the piece would be disingenuous, as Forest was produced in partnership with a large team of researchers and students from Ryerson University’s New Media Program. In this post, we go behind the scenes to learn about Forest’s development and detail how it was conceived, fabricated, and mounted.