Where: River Tyne, Outside Pitcher & Piano
When: Thursday 2 March
How Much: free (£10 refundable deposit for headphones).
Info: 0191 232 8289

Come and Welcome The Celeste!

 
Artists Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich’s spectacular mirror balled boat will be illuminated as it sails up the Tyne to arrive at the Millennium Bridge at 18.45 on Thursday 2 March 2006.

Collect your FM headphones (from 18.30) at the Pitcher and Piano, Newcastle Quayside to have an exclusive preview of How the Universe Synthesized Itself into Being, a newly commissioned broadcast for AV06. Featuring an original new soundscape by Newcastle based musicians Zoviet France and interviews with scientists working in the field of bio-science at Newcastle’s Centre for Life.

The broadcast will be on 107.5FM and www.avfest.co.uk.

Where: National Glass Centre,
When: Thursday 2 - 30 April
How Much: free
Info: 0191 232 8289

Nanotechnology is the creation of an unimaginably small technology — imagine micro robots — that will enter the most complex systems — say the human brain and beaver away mending things, or more seriously perhaps saving someone from cancer.

Durham-based artist Claire Davies has worked with scientists at Northumbria University’s Advanced Materials Research Institute, where nanotechnology is being developed, on a new work which uses this technology.

Wonderland is the resulting work, which is likely to be the closest you will get to being able to see in ‘nano-vision’. It is created from observing the surface of a plant petal through an atomic force microscope, and this unique instrument has a probe like a record player stylus to map the surface of objects. The detailed lines it produces are 100 nanometres wide (bear in mind a human hair is 50,000 nanometres wide). Claire has abstracted and animated this line, scaled it up and created a beautiful and unique evocation of the secret life of plants.

In Wonderland these organic living lines will appear to draw themselves on the façade of Sunderland’s landmark National Glass Centre layer by layer and extend across the river through surface reflections. The title is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s concept of animated and talking flowers. Claire says: “I was inspired by the beauty of what no human is able to see without the aid of technology and wanted to make that visible.”

 
Where: Bell Tower of Newcastle Civic Centre
When: Thursday 2 - Sunday 12 March
How Much: free  Info: 0191 232 8289

This is Gina Czarnecki’s first ever outdoor artwork and is so bewitching that when watching it you may lose all sense of space, time and purpose. More than 1000 images of naked dancers falling through space will run the length of Newcastle Civic Centre’s famous tower. Gina’s past work is directly influenced by her own harrowing experiences in an isolation unit, suspected of having contracted the deadly Ebola virus. Spine is part-biology, part-technology, and asks, what happens when the human genetic mix is corrupted?

 
The dancers in the film are only just recognisable as human forms as she tinkers with real time: stretching, smearing and distorting it until the dancers’ bodies gradually become intertwined, turbulent and mutated fragments. Individual forms merge, creating a super organism. Fleeting impressions are left which look like mutant animals or spectres. Gina equates them to most like smoke, “leaving a trail of movement behind them”. The result is beautiful and disturbing at the same time. Prepare to be bewitched by it.

Spine is produced by Forma and commissioned by AV Festival 06, co-produced with Australian Dance Theatre and supported by Arts Council England. Soundtrack by Christian Fennesz www.fennesz.com

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System C by Marius Watz is part of a projection programme called mima offsite: Animated Drawings, which is put together by the Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art. The programme also features animated drawings by artists from the past and present.

 

Where: BHS Linthorpe Road, Middlesbrough
When: Thursday 2 - Sunday 12 March
How Much: free
Info: 01642 803434


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System C by Marius Watz is part of a projection programme called mima offsite: Animated Drawings, which is put together by the Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art. The programme also features animated drawings by artists from the past and present. Marius Watz’s work is borne from his experiences creating graphics for the international techno scene in the early 90s. He has written some unique software which creates ever changing designs, which appear to grow and change organically.

 
He refers to his software as ‘drawing machines’, and sees the designs they make as drawings. Projected onto the side of Middlesbrough’s BHS building, curves will grow, twist and branch, forming tangled webs that resemble neuron pathways. The neon-like colours turn the shapes into explosions of light, before dissolving back into nothing.

Animated Drawings is part of mima offsite programme by mima – the Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art.