Northern Sparks Festival: Nuit Blanche

Comments (0) By Sheila Regan Wednesday, Jun 1 2011

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The Twin Cities art scene is getting a dose of Nuit Blanche this Saturday night with the inaugural year of the Northern Spark Festival, a celebration where art lovers will be able to travel from museums to art galleries to DIY art spaces to other surprising venues all night long from sunset to sunrise. The event features works by local artists and performers, including the BodyCartography Project, Wing Young Huie, Janaki Ranpura, and Andrea Stanislav. Northern Spark takes place in four main areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and in certain zones you'll be able to wander about and view multi-story projections, audio environments with vistas, and even hop on a boat for art and performance installations while traveling down the Mississippi. Among the highlights will be Diane Willow's beneath a glowing ceiling veil of living light, which will transform an arch of the Stone Arch Bridge into a chamber where glowing plankton light up in response to visitors, and Jim Campbell's Scattered Light, where 1,600 LED light bulbs suspended in the air will blink on and off at St. Paul's Upper Landing Park to recreate pedestrians' movements at NYC's Grand Central Station. There's also Piotr Szyhalski's nine-hour, participatory multimedia event constructed around the collective reading of Empty Words by John Cage, plus many other very cool things to see, do, and experience. For a complete schedule and list of locations, visit northernspark.org. From 8:55 p.m. Saturday to 5:28 a.m. Sunday. (Imagining Northern Spark, maquette and photography by Rasun Mehringer)
June 4-5, 2011