It's a cold, wet morning at the corner of Hastings and Carrall streets. Despite the weather, the triangular patch of concrete known locally as Pigeon Park is spotted with Downtown Eastsiders. They congregate here, as they do most days, in tattered groups or huddled alone in sleeping bags, their belongings damply bundled into bags and shopping carts. Overlooking them, at 1 West Hastings, is the historic Merchant's Bank building. The lower floor of its neoclassical faí§ade is wrapped in graffiti-covered plywood hoardings on which is mounted a development-permit notice. It states the developer's intent to renovate, add a storey to, and "adaptively re-use the 'A'-listed heritage building". A block away, no fewer than four construction cranes rise out of the rubble of what was once the Woodward's department store.

The Merchant's Bank building and Pigeon Park compose the site that multimedia artist Paul Wong will light up with video, still images, and text this Saturday (December 8), between 3 and 10 p.m. He's been working with a number of local institutions and initiatives, including Projections, a training and mentoring program in film and video for youth at risk. With his assistant, Brian Gotro, he's been walking the area, scouting locations, and shooting close-up and wide-angle images of the textured faí§ade of the building. He's also been talking to park regulars, listening to their stories, explaining his project, inviting them to return on Saturday so that they might see themselves video-projected, large and live, onto the building's altered face.

The layered projections, moving and still, along with life-size paper silhouettes of members of the Projections team in the upper-storey windows, are components of Everybody Is Somebody, the closing event of Intersection, a temporary public-art project curated by Karen Henry that has been under way at Hastings and Carrall for the past month. It combines film, video, installation, and backlit projection works at Centre A and the Interurban Gallery, and focuses on the theme of shining light into the darkness. The project was designed to open with the start of Diwali and close during Hanukkah, the South Asian and Jewish festivals of lights.

Light, in the metaphorical sense, is an element that's sadly missing in the area. "The Downtown Eastside has become as unique as Granville Island or Stanley Park," Wong says, sitting in his South Main studio. "It is a signature Vancouver place–a signature place in transition."

It's also an area he knows well. As a child, he attended after-school classes in Chinatown. A founder, in 1974, of Video In, an artist-run centre devoted to independent video production, he worked for 12 years at the corner of Powell and Main streets. More recently, Wong produced an Internet video piece about homelessness, hunger, and the Woodward's tent city. Everybody Is Somebody, he says, "is about looking–looking at where we are".

Sipping a mid-morning espresso, Wong reflects on the meanings of the Intersection commission, impending changes in the Downtown Eastside, and recent shifts in his own hectic existence. "I'm doing mornings for the first time in my adult life," he says with a laugh, then adds that after years of "zooming in and out" of Vancouver, undertaking projects and teaching positions across the country and around the world, he wants to reestablish himself in his hometown. He's determined to sift through his huge archive of video recordings, still photographs, audio cassettes, and colour slides. He wants to make sense and shape of his 30-plus years as a video pioneer.

One of the city's best-known and most highly acclaimed artists, Wong has in recent years been the recipient of numerous national honours, including the Governor General's Award for visual and media art. He has shown works at the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and biennials from Venice to Beijing. His career has been full of envelope-pushing explorations of sexual and cultural identity, violence, racism, and unwritten histories. He's quick to point out, however, that his work with the Intersection project is highly collaborative. "It's based on the human resources and technical resources that Projections, Centre A, and the Interurban are bringing to the table."

Then he adds: "We're going to warm up and humanize a hostile environment–'hostile' in the sense that it's not in a studio, it's not in a gallery, there are electrical issues, security issues, and the environment itself–the street, the noise, the crowds, the weather, the homeless, the commuters, the drivers, the workers, the shoppers”¦" He plans to set up canopies, under which video cameras and projectors will be located. He also wants to take Polaroid photos of DTES residents–to present to them. "It's a way I can give something back right away."

The subtitle of the Intersection project, Lighting Up the Carrall Street Greenway, alludes to the city's ambitious plan to reconfigure that street from False Creek to Burrard Inlet. The intention is to reduce car traffic in favour of pedestrians and bicyclists, increase plantings, create a pedestrian bridge over the portside rail yards, and support a public-art program along the greenway.

Given what's happening at the Woodward's site, Pigeon Park locals and DTES activists have expressed concern about gentrification, displacement, and the possibly complicit role that public-art projects might play in redevelopment. Wong sympathizes. "All I've always hoped for is choice and diversity–a multiplicity of possibilities, so that one thing doesn't stamp out the other," he says. "This is a neighbourhood in transition in a city that is bursting and booming.”¦There is an abundance of money, real or imagined, and there is the reality of homelessness and poverty and addiction and just survival." Everybody Is Somebody, he says, is a chance to look closely at the place where it all comes together. "And to work with it in this small way."