The magic of Northern Spark 2012 ranged from vying projections, glow-in-the-dark games and synchronized swinging to luminous dance and cyclists alight in the night.

In the new edition of the You Are Hear podcast, Maggie Ryan Sandford offers a dark twist on sharing custody of the family pet, and Melissa Louis Fletcher tells a story about an afternoon at the sweat lodge.

The Walker exhibition Minouk Lim: Heat of Shadows calls to mind both the earliest days of video art, writes Camille LeFevre, offering and a compelling, if dystopian view of what the near future may hold.

Ann Klefstad talks with Jim Perlman, editor/publisher of Duluth-based Holy Cow! Press, about the vicissitudes of his 35 years in the business and what it takes to persevere in an increasingly crowded book marketplace.

Landscape of the Mind, a group show at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery, resonates with a pervasive sense of fragility, of the impermanence of the human mind in the face of nature’s timelessness.

Live Action Set’s new show, Basic North, features spot-on comic timing and wordplay, but could benefit from more emotional depth and narrative nuance, writes Lightsey Darst.

Deborah Carver looks into Northern Spark, an all-night arts festival in the tradition of a European “nuit blanche,” and situates the event in context of other community-oriented festivals and public art programs like it.

In the first of a two-part look at Skewed Visions’ Black Water, Camille LeFevre offers her take on the work’s disquieting insight into place, seeing and being seen.

Carl Atiya Swanson parses a recent, unusually participatory evening of dance at the Walker: David Zambrano and company’s performance of the largely improvised series of solos against classic soul tunes, Soul Project.