#TOAF Toronto Outdoor Art Fair 2023

A field of white tents were setup in Nathan Phillips Square, full of all types of art. So art outdoors in Toronto, or TOAF. The 62nd annual fair took place from July 7-9, 2023 in the shadows of Toronto City Hall - with a beer garden.

From TOAF "great weekend of art collecting and artist discovery, installations, guided tours, soulful kids programs, live painting, and a brand new site-specific dance."

Honda Indy Toronto 2023 build continues

As the Honda Indy Toronto race weekend is fast approaching, the work setting up the temporary street course and all the associated grandstands, suites and assorted structures and components continue to be erected. Most of the track is built with concrete blocks and fencing, the pedestrian bridge is up across the track and sponsor signage and painting is underway. It won't be long before the big rigs of the racing teams start to show up on site and setup in their individual paddocks as the event runs from July 14-16, 2023.  You can see my first post of the initial build here.

Princes' Gates and Turn 1

Work on Lake Shore Boulevard, outside Exhibition Place takes place overnight starting Thursday, June 9, 2023 with full closures of the following streets on July 12; SB Strachan Ave (Fleet to Lake Shore) and Lake Shore Boulevard West (Strachan to Ontario). Lake Shore will remain closed until 1am on July 17, 2023.

Manitoba Drive - the far side of the track

Turn 5 at BMO Field

As the 35th edition of the race comes to town we can expect more of the high speed, exciting racing and the family friendly festival that provides plenty of on track action along with off track events, attractions, live entertainment, driver autographs, food trucks and beer gardens and the ever popular Thunder Alley. New for this year is the UNIBET Start Line Lounge and the UNIBET Victory Circle.

Turn 11 looking towards the pits and the pedestrian bridge

Panorama from BMO Field to Princes' Gates

Canada's own NASCAR Pinty's Series stockcars will be featured on Friday, July 14 with practice, qualifications and the race taking place all on the same day with the Tiffany Gates Grand Prix of Toronto starting at 5:10pm. You can watch them for free because the 14th is Fan Friday at Honda Indy Toronto sponsored by the Ontario Honda Dealers Association in support of Make-A-Wish Canada.

“We’re honoured to add Tiffany Gate to our fantastic list of Honda Indy Toronto partners as the new title sponsor of the NASCAR Pinty’s Series race. Tiffany Gate’s involvement provides further momentum to Fan Friday to increase the charitable impact that this great weekend in downtown Toronto will have again,” said Jeff Atkinson, president of Honda Indy Toronto. “Our festival goers having the opportunity to sample an assorted selection of Tiffany Gate’s classic comfort food is also a great new feature added to Thunder Alley.”

Headlining the weekend RaceFest will be the NTT IndyCar Series with practice, qualification and racing spread over the full three days. The IndyCar race will be on Sunday, July 16 with driver introductions at 1:10pm and the race beginning at 1:53pm. The race, the only international race on this year's schedule, will be 85-laps (244.31km) on the 2.874km, 11 turn temporary street circuit.

Ontario Drive

Lake Shore Boulevard West still untouched

Turn 11

Race series featured in the Honda Indy Toronto 2023 are as follows.

NTT INDYCAR SERIES - North America's premier open-wheel race series.
NASCAR Pinty’s Series - Racing in 5 provinces of Canada on ovals, road and dirt tracks.
USF Pro 2000 Presented by Cooper Tires - formerly Indy Pro 2000.
USF2000 Presented by Cooper Tires
Sports Car Championship Canada presented by Michelin - open to GT4 and TC sports cars.
Radical Cup Canada presented by Michelin (This is the first time at Honda Indy Toronto for this series)

From Honda Indy Toronto "The Radical brand is internationally recognized with 14 championships around the world for Radical sportscars. The Radical race car is exciting to watch and drive with it’s incredible downforce combined with exhilarating speed! Radical is the only prototype manufacturer to offer a premium factory supported single-make series on multiple continents, all with GT eclipsing performance but without approaching anything like a GT budget. Radicals are a lightweight race car that uses superbike technology. They are totally driver focused and rewarding to drive. Cars are easy to operate and offer unparalleled levels of performance."

Turn 10 Grandstand view from under the pedestrian bridge

Honda Indy Toronto Track Build 2023

UPDATE: See my post here for the continued track build

Before a sleek IndyCar can rocket down the streets of Toronto they must first build the temporary street course, put up the grandstands and suites and get Thunder Alley ready to roll. It takes about a month to put the track together, the thousands of blocks topped with a protective fence and stands constructed of hundreds of pieces of metal supports, seats and rails that have to be assembled by hand.

Posts from IndyTO 2023

Fan Friday July 14

Saturday July 15

Sunday July 16

Now only 11 days remain to the start of SpeedFest 2023 with Honda Indy Toronto beginning July 14-16 and much of the blocks have been installed on the roads within Exhibition Station. They always leave the external roads for last to reduce the closure of Lake Shore Boulevard. 

Working on Turn 11 grandstand

HIT currently has the 2022 race map up on site and it looks like the course is following the same layout as last year. Fans continue to talk about the placement of pit lane remembering that it used to be on the south side of Princes' Boulevard and moved due to the construction of Hotel X. It was squeezed in along the west edge of Enercare Centre / Nova Scotia Avenue which continues to make sense as it sits in front of a number of grandstands and suites, which is great for the fans.

Some new blocks have arrived on site - a nice blue colour. Looking towards Turn 8

Some tire barriers have turned up in Turn 5

The schedule shows headliner NTT IndyCar Series with their Grand Prix of Toronto race on Sunday, Canada's stockcar racers the Nascar Pinty's Series will race on the Friday, then a number of races on both the Saturday and Sunday by the supporting series: USF2000, Radicals, USF Pro 2000 and the Sports Car Championship Canada.

Radicals are the new boy on the Toronto block as they will debut in Honda Indy Toronto for 2023. The Radical Cup Canada (RCC) presented by Michelin. “We are so thrilled to be able to add Honda Indy Toronto as a stop for the Radicals this year. We want to thank Tom Drewer, Global Motorsport Director of Radical Motorsports Ltd., for working with us to get the Radical Cup North America North of the border to put this together,” said Jessica Benevides, FEL Motorsports Manager. “We also want to thank Jeff Atkinson, President at Honda Indy Toronto, for the opportunity to put both the SCCC and RCC on the schedule at the 2023 Honda Indy.”

The BMO Turn 11 grandstand is up, overlooking the pit bypass lanes

Looking towards pit lane and the pit lane trackside suites

The pedestrian bridge sits in sections for now

See more photos after the jump.

More of Collision Toronto 2023

Thousands of attendees are filtering into the Enercare Centre bright and early for Collision 2023. The many stages are ready for a world class lineup of speakers and the tech companies are setting up for the busy day. Most of the talks start around 10am so pick something that interests you and go listen. I am using their handy app to find the content, timing and location to schedule my time through the day. The conference runs June 26 to 29 in Exhibition Place.

I am starting off with "the future of digital marketing and content strategies" and I plan to finish with "electrifying the cow". With just minutes to go it is already standing room only at the Startup Showcase stage.

With the Startup Showcase new companies come on stage for rapid, two minute presentations concentrating around the topic. 

Colin on Centre Stage

At Centre Stage at 10:30am Google Deepmind's Colin Murdoch began his hour long talk on "how AI is changing the world" with around 2,000 people listening to him speak. He tells us that AI will solve humanities problems tackling the world's biggest challenges, like climate change, weather forecasting and effective, affordable health care. Hopefully this will work without creating too many additional challenges!

Apparently the shape of proteins are very important and AI has been able to map out the 3D patterns of the building blocks of life.

In the future Colin sees more of AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. This type of AI is better able to work on many different types of problems.

Talking twitter

Then it was time for "is the engineer dead", followed by "what's next for the news on twitter", a panel discussion on the current state of Twitter.  They note that Elon bought Twitter for $44 billion then set upon a strategy of massive change, not the least being the blue check mark.  Now it is harder to follow events and find trusted content and even the meaning of the blue checkmark has changed. Because of this many people and companies have dropped out of the Twitterverse. Can Twitter survive the loss of advertisers and the jungle that it has become? One suggestion is bring back the free verified checkmark!

DealPotential - time to fast track your funding process

Plantaform

Startup Showcase 

Get IT done quietly, shhhhhh

Meat and agriculture is one of the challenges the earth faces due to its impact to the environment. Joshua March from SciFi Foods talked about the impact of some practices such as deforestation to allow for cows to graze, or the contribution of so many cows producing methane providing a negative impact to climate change. He notes that Bill Gates has said that everything has to be electrified, or in the case of meat must be lab grown, to have a chance to limit temperature increases which is sad that he pointed out that sales of lab grown meats and vegetarian 'meat' has leveled off.

All and all the web summit has been an exceptional value and great opportunity to network and learn at the same time. Don't forget that Collision is returning to Toronto in 2024.

Toronto Collision Tech Conf 2023

The tech world has arrived at Toronto's doorway as the massive conference called Collision returns to the Enercare Centre in Exhibition Place from June 26-29, 2023. See more of the conference on my post here.

It's hard to believe how many companies are in the building from around the globe, including some of the largest like Google and Amazon to some of the smaller firms looking for entry with the big boys and girls in the industry.

From Collision, "Collision will soon take over Toronto, with 150-plus hours of talks, masterclasses and networking sessions for attendees from all over the world to enjoy. The three-day event gives attendees the chance to mix with tech giants, leading entrepreneurs and cultural icons, and to learn from the people at the forefront of the tech industry and of society at large."

Outside the building is an army of food trucks and the occasional bar for some adult beverages. Inside is quite a few stages along with rows and rows of companies looking to contact the right people to make magic happen. There are at least two stages setup for people to pitch business ideas to an esteemed group of judges.

Some important stats from Collision:

Collision will gather 36,378 attendees from 118 countries in Toronto

A record-breaking 30 percent of startups this year this year are women-founded

41 percent of attendees are women; 36 percent of speakers are women

1,72727 startups and partners from 76 countries and almost 30 industries are are exhibiting

CA$188 million has been injected into the Toronto economy over the course of the three in-person Collision events since 2019

Toronto Pride Parade 2023

The big weekend finale to Pride Month hits Toronto with three days of marches on the last weekend of June 2023. Friday was the Trans March, Saturday was the Dyke March and the big one is Pride Parade on Sunday, June 25 beginning at 2pm. The street festival on Church Street in the Gay Village runs over the weekend as well.

See more of Pride after the jump.