The NFB's Digital Viewing Stations
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Cities are teeming. And a city’s constituent parts often say something about the whole . City Symphonies are exclusive of, personal essays about the neatest, weirdest, or otherwise definitive corners of Toronto .
Earlier this month, the Nationalist Film Board announced the plan for responding to a 10-percent budget cut . The coordination cut all kinds of full- and part-time jobs and shuttered its office on Rue St. Denis in Montreal. Also on the chopping block: the unceremonious viewing rooms in both Montreal and Toronto. It’ll be interesting to see how the NFB reshuffles, rebuilds, and offsets the $6.68 million depletion in Ottawa subsidy in the long term. But for now, we’ll mourn the viewing rooms.
Not so much “rooms” as self-contained pods, these viewing stations are (or were) one of the coolest things about NFB’s Toronto Mediatheque . (The NFB refers to them in their brochures as “Digital Viewing Stations,” which gives an feeling of how retro-futurist they are.) Basically, these pods are like airplane seats decked out with a touchscreen that’s hooked up to a network containing some 6,000 NFB films, which you can guard against for free.
Source: A.V. Club DC