The AV Festival 06 complete programme has been publicly announced (on 19 January 2006).

The AV06 Guide Book is now available for download in text-only format. (.doc) Click here to download the text-only Guide Book.

To request a Guide to be sent by post, please fill in the online application form or email info@avfest.co.uk, marking your email ‘Guide request’.

A 14pt text version of the guide is available by post or email. Please email info@avfest.co.uk to request one, marking your email clearly ‘14 point text version’.

Outdoor projections will launch the festival on 2 March.
Specially commissioned works by leading digital artists, Gina Czarnecki, Claire Davies and Marius Watz will illuminate some of the region’s best-known buildings and public spaces including the Newcastle Civic Centre and the National Glass Centre in Sunderland.

AV’s Opening Gala (3 March), is a once-in-a-lifetime night as we take over The Sage Gateshead to present six and a half hours of audio visual work. It includes world premieres by electronic musicians and artists Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai.

On 5 March, Michael Nyman - the composer of films like The Piano and Gattaca - presents a new and exclusive concert – Orchestrating the Genome -and makes his debut as a visual artist. Also at the Sage Gateshead, Japanese musician Suguru Goto presents his extraordinary robot musicians (4 - 5 March).

On 7 March, AV opens 3 major new exhibitions commissioned by the festival, created by Andy Gracie, Anthony McCall, and Kenneth Rinaldo. Rinaldo's uncanny and seemingly alive Autotelematic Spider Bots will be an undoubted highlight of the festival. In a playful exploration of the principles of biomechanics, Time’s Up present their Sensory Circus for the first time in the UK (opening 9 March).

In the biotechnical age, artists are making laboratories their new studios, fashioning artworks from the very fabric of life. In Middlesbrough, AV features Australian artists, Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr who create sculptures inside the laboratory, growing artworks made of living tissue (opening 10 March).

Despite charges against him, Steve Kurtz will introduce the world premiere of Critical Art Ensemble’s new film Marching Plague at the Tyneside Cinema (4 March).

The Tyneside Cinema and other venues around the region will be showing a dynamic film programme that shows how cinema has delivered us a vision of lifelike technology through perennial classics and dazzling new wave films from Asia such as Casshern. AV will also feature films that show how genetic science can be manipulated to alter or control society, as seen in Gattaca, Able Edwards, and Code 46.