What is Spark?
For one week each year, the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts brings creators and performers of new media arts from around the world to the Twin Cities to share their work with the public. Spark celebrates all uses of new technologies for artistic expression, including music, video, theater, dance, plastic artworks, and more. Centered around Minneapolis’ west bank theater district and the adjoining University of Minnesota West Bank Arts Quarter, Spark partners the university with leading community members, including musicians, choreographers, actors, directors, and video artists, to determine programming and present performances, workshops, discussions, and scholarly lectures. Nearly all Spark events are free, and all Spark events open to the general public.
Spark’s Mission:
The purpose of the Spark festival is to foster a forum for the presentation of new art and for critical discussion of its meaning and use. Spark strives to cross traditional borders, connect communities of technology-based creators, engage the wider public, and inspire audiences with the subtlety, power, and beauty possible in new media arts.
Spark’s Goal’s:
1. Bring the finest new works from around the world to our community,
2. Bring together exciting international, national, and local artists to exchange ideas,
3. Showcase collaborative and interdisciplinary works
4. Showcase the most outstanding new media works of the University of Minnesota and particularly the West Bank Arts Quarter of the College of Liberal Arts
5. Facilitate a public dialogue about the role of technology in our culture.
Who is Spark’s Audience?
The Spark Festival prides itself on presenting edgy, ambitious, and outrageous works, and the fans of Spark are curious people who want to feed their minds, enjoy trying new experiences, and are excited by new technology. They are a mix of young people, fans of theater, dance, electronic dance music, and new directions in art and classical music. Spark fans naturally look toward new media for artistic expression that offers them insights into contemporary life and the search for meaning within it. They seek both depth of feeling and irreverence, which Spark often presents side-by-side –or even in the same work.
Spark is also developing an online archive of works presented, so that all interested people worldwide with Internet connections will soon be able to access and view Spark performances any time of day, any day of the year, from any location.
Who Are Spark’s Artists?
Chosen from hundreds of submissions from around the world, the artists chosen represent the top of their respective fields. Many of the artists and arts that Spark presents are in a way the R & D for the popular arts, providing a kind of “sneak preview” and an incubator for technologies and creative expressions that might appear on Broadway or MTV years later. Spark brings these artists to participate in and enhance the Twin Cities’ cultural and technological vitality.
For Spark 2007, Spark received nearly eight hundred submissions, and chosen artists represented seventeen countries and about half the states of the USA. Countries represented included India, England, Sweden, France, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Japan, Lithuania, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, Denmark, Australia, Mexico, the Czech Republic, and New Zealand.
Visibility and Media Coverage
Spark has established a major international profile, and a popular following: over 4,000 people attended the events held at the Spark 2006 and 2007 festivals, and thousands more participated via online streaming of festival content. Moreover, Spark 2006 and 2007 were featured in the local news media, including Fox 9 television, MPR radio, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and a number of local weekly papers.
Spark has also been reviewed prominently, including a very positive notice in the Computer Music Journal, the leading publication in computer music studies.
How Spark Works
Each spring, the Spark Festival chooses a small number of artists to feature at the next year’s festival as “keynote” guests and arranges for their participation. Soon afterwards, Spark announces a call for submissions of works in multiple categories: Music, theater and dance performance, video, art installations, and radio works. The call for works is distributed worldwide, via numerous music and Arts organizations to their memberships and directly to arts websites and listservs, and it also announces the identities of the keynote guests for the festival.
Soon after the call for works has been distributed, submissions begin arriving to be considered. Once the submission deadline passes, the Spark administrators convene juries for each category to consider the works submitted and choose the most impressive works for inclusion in Spark. The juries are composed of University of Minnesota faculty, staff, and students, numerous other Twin Cities and regional musicians and artists.
Spark’s administrators study the highest quality works chosen by the juries and build a program for the festival based on logistics and programming consideration. Once a Festival program has been created, Spark notifies all artists who submitted whether or not their work has been selected and communicate further with the selected artists to begin preparing details for presenting works at the festival. Meanwhile, publicity begins to announce the Spark program details to the public, and continues through the duration of the festival itself.
Finally, the Spark Festival springs to life in late February, as all the invited artists convene, present their work, and interact with their public.