The annual Time-Based Art festival kicks off tomorrow, promising ten days of theater, dance, visual art, film, and dance parties in the back of a truck (true!). We'll be covering the festival extensively over on our TBA blog: that means reviews, daily picks, beer-garden gossip, interviews, attempts to survive Mike Daisey's 24-Hour Monologue, and anything else we deem internet-worthy. Up first, we've got a preview of tomorrow's event The Hidden Lives of Bridges, an opening night spectacle that involves giant video projections on the side of the Morrison bridge.

After last year's festival, I wrote that TBA:2010 felt insular and shut off, compared to previous years:

One thing [the festival was missing] was the citywide programming that former artistic director Mark Russell emphasized—Khris Soden's Portland Tour of Tilburg; the Halprin project, which brought Anna Halprin's modern choreography to Portland fountains designed by her husband, Lawrence Halprin; that ill-fated scavenger hunt; big opening night spectacles involving Portland's public spaces. Sure, they were occasionally underwhelming and/or ridiculous, but at their best they lent the festival a sense of adventure and excitement.

The Hidden Lives of Bridges is just such a project: It's a big free public spectacle that attempts to shed some new light on an element of our cityscape we all kind of take for granted. Over on the blog, we've got video and more details about just how the show will unfold.

Click here for complete TBA event listings.