The AgorA FestiF (literally, "Partying Agora") is an annual transdisciplinary mega-party in Montreal, Quebec. The 4th event just ended a few hours ago - I'm exhausted. Basically, it's a big artistic happening starting at about 18h00 and ending the next day at 7h00. They say about 4-5,000 people attended AF this year.

For the last two years, the event took place in the Etiennes-Desmarteaux hockey arena. Two large areas, one with a dozen or so rock/alternative bands and the other with a plethora of DJs and electro music. During the whole night, different projects were scattered near the two separated scenes and in the various rooms of the arena. To give an example, here is a quick list of the various things you could have stumbled upon:

• Many painters doing live or collective pieces.
• A weird mash-up of the three Back to the Future movies by a certain Emmanuel Lagrange. I watched it three times.
• Body painting, nude or facial.
• A live man-sized chess game.
• A frisbee game. In the dark. With 20 people.
• Various circus performers.
• Tango dancers.
• Open mic sessions.
• An interactive conversation on video controlled by stationary bikes. More on that below.
• Political debates.

The list above is only what I saw. Dancers and performers were everywhere, a lot of people were costumed. A small group of people recreated Homer's The Odyssey with common household objects. Live gardening. Improv. Beer and food.

The most impressive project for me was indeed the stationary bikes thing. Let me try to explain how it went.
A group called Drone (technological art for the masses) were using two stationary bikes to control two characters on a screen. Two real humans are sitting in chairs, idle. Scratching their head, looking at the roof. As soon as someone starts pedaling, the guy starts talking. If two people are pedaling at the same time, a strange dialogue takes place. They don't talk about anything in particular, they just whine about stuff. But the faster you go, the more intense the argument gets. It's a nice feat. Maybe I was impressed because they were using Linux - I was always peering over their shoulder to see what was happening on that KDE desktop.

From their website: "Drone is an open source software for digital and interactive arts. It allows the design of realtime signal processing machines for video and audio through a generic data flow interface."

Links:
AgorA FestiF: http://www.agorafestif.info/
2005 list of events (in French): http://www.agorafestif.info/agora2005/fr/programmation_af4.pdf
Drone: http://drone.ws