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Aurora art festival promises to challenge all your senses

Think of it this way: You are asked to plan a wedding or bar mitzvah, but instead of a hotel ballroom, you have all 68 acres of the Dallas Arts District to work with. You are the one put in charge of managing all the moving parts and somehow making it come together. The details, the details.

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"It is a large responsibility, but it's a lot of fun," says Joshua King, who, along with Shane Pennington, is one of the founders of Aurora, a one-night presentation of new media art that promises to light up the Arts District on Oct. 16. It is free and open to the public.

"The fun part is doing something that's challenging," King says. "You get to lay out the chess board and really look at everything and just say, 'OK, what needs to happen?'"

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Pennington and King co-founded Aurora along with former City Council member Veletta Forsythe Lill, who served as the inaugural executive director of the Arts District. It has now become an every-two-years event, with this year's incarnation being the biggest so far. Aurora will showcase 80 artists from all over the world.

Assisting Pennington and King are four guest curators; each is assigned to an area of the Arts District.

The combination of guest curators from Berlin, New York and Dallas has helped, Pennington says, "to bring in new ideas, new energy, new thoughts. It breathes life into the event."

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Pennington says the theme is "all together now." To get a bit more technical, it operates on the principle of synesthesia, which he defines as "a union of the senses."

"We wanted this year to be a very sensory experience," Pennington says, "with light, media and sound, so that when you come to the event, all of the senses are elevated."

What visitors to the Arts District will get to see that night is what Pennington and King call 21st century artistry.

"When we started Aurora, the overarching idea was the art of light, video and sound," King says. "That encompasses the performance, the projection -- everything. It's an art form that burst out of the engineering and technology of today's time. Computers have really become a paintbrush for artists these days."

In other words, Aurora amplifies on the concept of using light as a medium. Computers have empowered a major change in a concept invented long ago.

"It's kind of an evolution," King says, "from the very beginning of capturing light onto paper to using light as a medium to now using light as the object to create art."

Aurora began as a "new media event" in 2010 in Heritage Village, which used to be called Old City Park. Invited to appear, Lill "fell in love with it," Pennington says, and invited them to re-create the experience in the Arts District.

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"Joshua and I knew at the time that it would be something big," says Pennington, who urged Lill to check out the Nuit Blanche (literally white night, but idiomatically a sleepless night) new media festival in Toronto.

That led to Aurora's first presence in the Arts District in 2011, when more than 20,000 people attended, despite the fact that the Texas Rangers were playing Game 7 that night in the World Series. Alas, Texas lost.

In 2012, a smaller Aurora took place, and in 2013, an estimated 30,000 showed up.

Pennington credits the staff of the AT&T Performing Arts Center with being a huge help in pulling off this year's event.

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The 2015 version is presented by the AT&T Performing Arts Center and supported by presenting sponsor energy provider Reliant. Its founding media partner is The Dallas Morning News.