Four years deep, following lower-key attempts to add extra days of placehacking to the festival, #NightShift16 has spread out to include more nights (and days) of programming. Night\Shift 2016’s main event on Saturday, November 5th will feature an array of free multidisciplinary art and performances in 18 downtown Kitchener spaces over a dozen city blocks . But there are also two exhibits that bookend that date, five straight nights of live music at the INFINITY TUNNEL installation, and an epic day-long participatory project that turns festival-goers into film stars.
The life-sized comic strip \\ Mercury Cafe windows
Illustrator Trevor Waurechen is already more than a dozen panels into his month-long residency project for Night\Shift, which turns the Mercury Cafe’s floor-to-ceiling windows into a huge see-through comic strip . He’s adding panels every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, leaving a home stretch of drawings to finish up between 7pm and midnight on Nov. 5th – when festival-goers will be invited to colour in his illustrated story on the opposite sides of the cafe windows. The Mercury will also be hawking food and drink, and its sister business gets in on the festival fun from 11pm to 2am with a super creepy late-night screening .
4 ramp-up nights of live music \\ Nov 1st-4th @7pm
Starting at 7pm on Tuesday, November 1st, Night\Shift 2016 will officially kick off five nights of live music on the 2nd floor of 44 Gaukel in downtown Kitchener, where two local artists have installed a sound-responsive hall of mirrors called the INFINITY TUNNEL for the performers to “play.” The lineup features at least two acts each night and a sprawling range of genres – from psychedelic folk to granular techno to existential subterranean disco to sludge rock to textural beats.
The DTKreAXE project \\ KPL central branch
Nine local tech firms accepted an outta-left-field challenge from Night\Shift in late summer: accept an unsalvageable acoustic guitar body, assemble of small task force of employees and use ingenuity to reimagine it as something else . It’s fairly clear that NetSuite went bonkers on this project and created a truly fabulous beast!
On Saturday November 5th, festival-goers can check out all nine remade guitars , pitch in on remaking a few more old acoustics with crafting materials, and soak up a pair of performances by two incredible Canadian singer-songwriters, Aaron Mangle & Jennifer Castle .
24-Hour Dolly \\ Dylan Reibling’s long-haul star-maker
Filmmaker Dylan Reibling created a spontaneity-fuelled cinematic endurance piece for Toronto’s 2011 Nuit Blanche called 12-Hour Dolly , which invited people to step onto a small square platform inside a circular dolly track with a videocamera filming whatever happens in the middle as a crew manually pushes the dolly without stopping for half a day. Contributing to Night\Shift 2016, Reibling is literally doubling down by mounting a 24-Hour Dolly in Kitchener City Hall’s circular rotunda, beginning at 3am on Saturday, Nov. 5th and pressing on until 3am (aka 2am with the time change) on Sunday, Nov. 6th. Are you ready for your close up?
