If the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts has its way, the 2008 Biennial won't go quietly into the night. Sunday will be its last day but only after a closing celebration beginning at 7 p.m. Saturday that promises all the energy and surprises the Center and partner Pittsburgh Filmmakers have become known for.

Admission is $5 at the door (or use your Bi-Pass to get in for free). Events include Biennial artists presenting a sound performance, light show, hot metal pour, art performance and video projections, plus live music and refreshments.

A multimedia-iron-pour performance by metalworkers Ed and Carley Parrish, founders of the hotmetalhappenings project, will include visually spectacular segments such as ice casting, which creates cavities in ice blocks and makes them glow, creating organic metal formations. Open-faced sand molds will channel metal to ignite gunpowder on the ground, creating fire drawings.

The couple's performances, given in public venues, fuse traditional, industrial arts-like metal casting and blacksmithing with contemporary, multidisciplinary actions.

The pour will be accompanied by Jim Mueller's film projections and musical accompaniment by Centipede E'est.

But first, Margaret Cox and Michael Johnsen will perform an improvised set of radio signals, magnetic source material and electo-acoustic devices.

Nicole Czapinski and Bryan Kyckelhahn begin their evening in and around a Plexiglas cube upon which one of them paints lines resembling those of a topographic map and the other fills them in, eventually obscuring the cube interior.

"Everyday boxes or containers," the artists write about the piece, "A womb. Transportation: cars, bikes, legs. Carting ourselves from one place to another but always going back home, back and forth, the commute each day, week, year. To work, to home, to work, to the grocery store ... . We are almost always in some kind of box or container: houses, cars and the inescapable: our bodies constantly enclosed, one thing inside of another. We are confined to where we live.

"Is this comforting or restrictive?"

Later, Czapinski and Kyckelhahn move outdoors to incorporate light and altered trees into their performative expression.

Also debuting at the closing party is the second installment of the exhibition catalog, which was designed by Encyclopedia Destructica, a local artist collective that publishes limited-edition books and zines. Headed by Christopher Kardambikis and Jasdeep Khaira, the collective aims to present contemporary art in a way that is "engaging and accessible."

The first book, an intimate, tactile and hand-bound work produced in an edition of 300, includes brief biographies of Biennial artists and illustrations exemplifying each artist's process or work, if not the actual artworks in the exhibition ($15). The second installment will include images of installations and performances completed or enacted after the first installment was published and a DVD with Biennial video and film works ($25).