St. Laurent is brilliant, but is it art?

The Societe de developpement du boulevard Saint-Laurent sidestepped any holiday controversy this year by flipping the switch on 65 energy-efficient LED installations attached to the lamp posts between Sherbrooke St. and Mont Royal Ave. Instead of the usual, overplayed holiday symbols, they paid a pretty penny, opting for a unique, locally designed and semi-permanent decor that's yearlong, secular, abstract, minimalist and digital.

At the very least, the two six-kilometre rows of radio-controlled, processor-equipped chandeliers made up of 10 one-metre-long LED tubes spaced in a circle, will serve as a new visual signature for St. Laurent, bringing unity to the always eclectic, but recently beleaguered boulevard.

In the eyes of the incoming SDBSL president and owner of the hipster hideaway Laika, Bruno Ricciardi-Rigault, The Main's rows of seemingly hovering illuminated rods are nothing less than a keen bet on a cutting-edge new medium, which avant garde artists living and working on St. Laurent, as well as international talent, will use to rekindle The Main's pulse.

"St. Laurent is not just businesses, it's the spinal cord of Montreal, so it has to be alive," he says. "It's nearly 2012, so this will be something new. The digital video arts scene, formerly VJing, has now evolved very far, blending video, lighting, environments and experiences. This goes way beyond Christmas lights, literal images or even cinema."

While the yet-to-be-named light fixtures will remain static during the holiday shopping season, for Montreal's Nuit Blanche, on Feb. 25, they will spring to life, able to flicker in a programmed sequence, connected via a network by low-frequency radio signals.

"It's like a peer-to-peer network, where each fixture speaks to its neighbours to achieve these large-scale lighting effects and animations," says Vincent Leclerc, principal at Eski, a Point St. Charles-based studio, of their latest innovative technology.

"Our biggest challenge was to be energy efficient in order to meet the city's specifications," Leclerc says. Each fixture's environmental footprint equals that of a regular 100 watt bulb.

Indeed, the yearlong possibilities are dazzling. "Lights chasing each other from pole to pole, red, white and blue for the Habs, the national colours of St. Laurent's communities, colour schemes for each block, red for St. Valentine's, green for St. Patrick's, a wave from top to bottom," Ricciardi-Rigault offers.

Cringing denizens take heart: "The light shows could be more commercial at times, like for the Grand Prix," he says, "But a better approach ongoing for the continuity of the boulevard's culture would be to find real lighting artists, like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer or Axel Morganthaler, who could use the lights to do something really magical."

He remains sanguine about the SDBSL's $125,000 lighting caper planned to last for the next five years, "Annually, it's what we would have spent for something really common in the past."