Nuit Blanche all-night contemporary art festivals will have city-dwellers out into the wee hours in Toronto and Winnipeg on Saturday.

Beginning at dusk, more than 100 artists take over the streets of both cities, with interactive installations geared to getting the public involved.

At the Winnipeg Art Gallery, artists Guy Maddin, Sarah Anne Johnson, Michael Dudeck and Paul Butler are taking part in the gallery’s 100th birthday celebration to kick off Nuit Blanche celebrations.

Toronto City Hall is standing in for the Museum for the End of the World, with a series of exhibits that reflect on how the apocalypse might look.

Taking over Nathan Philips Square is Toronto artist Christine Davis’s World Without Sun, a sound and light projection that includes images from dark worlds that usually go unseen, including the depths of the ocean and outer space.

Davis has scavenged 16 satellite dishes from the junkyard to project her images of things that she believes will survive humanity’s assault on the earth, ranging from jellyfish to clouds to stars.

“I think there’s a consideration in my work all the time about the direction mankind is going in and the difficult point we’re at right now, politically, socially. We don’t quite know how to proceed,” Davis said in an interview.

Lifecyles - watch the plants grow to music by Matthew Moore of Phoenix. (Matthew Moore/Toronto)

“One of the things we need to think about is the fact that the world will move forward with us, as humans. We need to acknowledge the fact that the world exists in and of itself and we’re not the centre of it,” .

Davis says she hopes her installation will inspire “terror and hope.”

Dozens of national and international artists will take part in the Toronto celebration among them:

• Rhonda Weppler of San Francisco and Trevor Mahovsky of Vancouver who are creating All Night Convenience Store, a store in which every object for sale will be a lantern.
• Matthew Moore of Phoenix, whose Lifecycles video installation shows plants growing to a musical score.
• Trisha Brown Dance Company of New York, who scale a four-metre wall as part of the dance piece Planes, 1968.
• Laurent Gagnon of Québec City, whose Tower of Progress is a huge obelisk composed of metal parts of discarded machines.
• Andrew Kearney of London, U.K., who will suspend an inflatable cloud that changes constantly in the CBC Atrium, for the installation titled SKYLUM.