Expo 67, the world's fair held in Montreal during the summer of 1967, brought architecture, art, design, and technology together into a glittering modern package. Heralding the ideal city of the future to its visitors, the Expo site was perceived by critics as a laboratory for urban and architectural design as well as for cultural exchange, intended to enhance global understanding and international cooperation. This collection of essays brings new critical perspectives to Expo 67, an event that left behind a significant material and imaginative legacy. The contributors to this volume reflect a variety of interdisciplinary approaches and address Expo 67 across a broad spectrum ranging from architecture and film to more ephemeral markers such as postcards, menus, pavilion displays, or the uniforms of the hostesses employed on the site. Collectively, the essays explore issues of nationalism, the interplay of tradition and modernity, twentieth-century discourse about urban experience, and the enduring impact of Expo 67's technological experimentation. Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir is a compelling examination of a world's fair that had a profound impact locally, nationally, and internationally.

In National Performance, Erin Hurley examines the complex relationship between performance and national identity. How do theatrical performances represent the nation in which they were created? How is Quebecois performance used to define Quebec as a nation and to cultivate a sense of 'Quebec-ness' for audiences both within and outside the province? In exploring Expo 67, the critical response to Michel Tremblay's Les Belles Soeurs, Carbone 14's image-theatre, Marco Micone's writing practices, Celine Dion's popular music, and feminist performance of the 1970s and 80s, Hurley reveals the ways in which certain performances come to be understood as 'national' while others are relegated to sub-national or outsider status. Each chapter focuses on a particular historical moment in Quebec's modern history and a genre of performance emblematic of the moment, and uses these to elaborate the nature of the national performances. Winner of the Northeast Modern Language Association's Book Prize, National Performance is sophisticated yet accessible, seeking to enlarge the parameters of what counts as 'Quebecois' performance, while providing a thorough introduction to changing discourses of nation-ness in Quebec.

The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair was the largest international exhibition ever built in the United States. More than one hundred fifty pavilions and exhibits spread over six hundred forty-six acres helped the fair live up to its reputation as "the Billion-Dollar Fair." With the cold war in full swing, the fair offered visitors a refreshingly positive view of the future, mirroring the official theme: Peace through Understanding. Guests could travel back in time through a display of full-sized dinosaurs, or look into a future where underwater hotels and flying cars were commonplace. They could enjoy Walt Disney's popular shows, or study actual spacecraft flown in orbit. More than fifty-one million guests visited the fair before it closed forever in 1965. The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair captures the history of this event through vintage photographs, published here for the first time.

An exploration of Expo 67's most ingenious screen experiments.

An “episode of light” in Canada sparked by Expo 67 when new art forms, innovative technologies, and novel institutional and policy frameworks emerged together. Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Michael Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67. Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. Century offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren’s “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre. Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis.

Few Canadians over the age of forty can forget the feeling of joy and celebration that washed over the country during Canada's centennial year. We were, Pierre Berton reminds us, a nation in love with itself, basking in the warm glow of international applause brought on by the unexpected success of Expo 67 and pumped up by the year-long birthday party that had us all warbling "Ca-na-da, as Bobby Gimby and his gaggle of small children pranced down the byways of the nation. It was a turning-point year, a watershed year--a year of beginnings as well as endings. One royal commission finally came to a close with a warning about the need for a new approach to Quebec. Another was launched to investigate, for the first time, the status of Canadian women. New attitudes to divorce and homosexuality were enshrined in law. A charismatic figure, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, made clear that the state had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. The seeds of Women's Lib, Gay Pride, and even Red Power, were sown in the centennial year. (Of all the pavilions on the Expo site, Berton singles out the Indian pavilion as having the greatest impact.) The country was in a ferment that year. Canadians worried about the Americanization of every institution from the political convention to "Hockey Night in Canada. People talked about the Generation Gap as thousands of flower children held love-ins in city parks. The government tried to respond by launching the Company of Young Canadians, a project that was less than successful. The most significant event of 1967 was Charles de Gaulle's notorious "Vive le Quebec libre!" speech in Montreal. It gave the burgeoning separatist movement a new legitimacy, enhanced by Rene Levesque's departure from the Liberal party later that year. Throughout the book, the author gives us insightful profiles of some of the significant figures of 1967: the centennial activists Judy LaMarsh and John Fisher; the Expo entrepreneurs, Philippe de Gaspe Beaubien and Edward Churchill; Walter Gordon, the fervent nationalist, and his rival, Mitchell Sharp; Lester Pearson and his "bete noire, John Diefenbaker; the three "men of the world" who helped make Canada internationally famous: Marshall McLuhan, Glenn Gould, and Roy Thomson; hippie leaders like David dePoe, American draft dodgers like Mark Satin, women's activists like Doris Anderson and Laura Sabia, youth workers like Barbara Hall, radicals like Pierre Vallieres (author of "White Niggers of America) and such dedicated nationalists as Madame Chaput Rolland and Andre Laurendeau. In spite of the feeling of exultation that marked the centennial year, an opposite sentiment runs through the book like dark thread: the growing fear that the country was facing its gravest crisis. Berton points out that we are far better off today than we were in 1967. "Then why all the hand wringing?" he asks. Because of "the very real fear that the country we celebrated so joyously thirty years ago is in the process of falling apart. "In that sense, 1967 was the last good year before all Canadians began to be concerned about the future of our country."