Northern Lights.mn Newsletter May 25th
Art(ists) On the Verge 8 Exhibition Opening June 3 |
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Journey Down the Green Line, Part 2 |
Doesn’t this sound like an incredible night?It’s all made possible by our awesome artists, partner organizations, dedicated community members, creative local businesses, generous funders, and YOU! Every year we stretch the budget to bursting and this year is no exception. We need your help to make sure Northern Spark breaks even so we can plan on next year, too. Don’t wait — Give today: $20, $50, or whatever amount you can. That magic feeling of Northern Spark? That’s made by all of us, together, pitching in and showing up.
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Art + Action with the Climate Rising Collaborations
At Northern Lights.mn, we believe that in order to develop realistic and hopeful maps for a climate-changed future, artists, scientists, policymakers and activists will need to collaborate. One way this is happening is the Climate Rising Collaboration, an initiative funded by the McKnight Foundation that pairs festival artists with organizations working directly on climate issues through policy, advocacy and community organizing. Five organizations are lending climate data, volunteer ranks, networks and wide-ranging powers of expertise and knowledge to artists whose project take on subjects ranging from trees to water protectors to the many forms of migration. For TakeAction Minnesota, working with Wavelets Creative on iNMiGRATiON is an opportunity to integrate art into their organizing in an intentional way and to give their volunteer base an artful way to get active. For Climate Generation, whose knowledge about the effects of climate change on trees is informing Roger Nieboer and Craig David’s Arboreous, being part of Northern Spark affords the opportunity to get their core message out to broader audience. On festival night look for some of the CRC organizations at the Northern Spark Info Tents where they’ll be sharing table space. Stop by for a festival map and learn about ways to get more deeply involved in climate action. McKnight is also generously supporting Northern Spark’s festival-wide game, Collective Action!
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Get ready to play Collective Action!, Northern Spark 2017’s festival-wide game
Assistant Curator Elle Thoni sat down with Sara Fowler, Ben Moren and Tyler Stefanich, the artist team behind Collective Action!, Northern Spark 2017’s festival-wide game. ELLE: So, to begin, your team is coming to the game designing table from a variety of artistic backgrounds. What are they? BEN: Well, I come from visual arts and multimedia art, combining filmmaking, performance, software development… so kind of all the pieces you would need. I do lots of work that centers on interaction, but not necessarily with the classic parameters that make a game a game. SARA: I’m trained and work professionally as a graphic designer and an illustrator. I’m a freelancer and do most of my work within the arts in some capacity. I also like to give some of my practice to activism, supporting environmental efforts with my professional background. TYLER: And I come from visual arts as well, doing installation as well as performance. I’ve worked for awhile in design and more technical web design for nonprofits. Now I manage an experimental game lab in Los Angeles. ELLE: When you came together to design a game, what was important to you? What kind of experience did you want people to have? SARA: So awhile ago, Ben and I stumbled upon these amazing books. They were written by Stewart Brand – one of the major forces behind the Whole Earth Catalog. The books were an encyclopedia of games from the New Games Foundation. They are group games, essentially, but a lot of them are non-competitive and have a strange performativity to them. Thematically, they’re very geared towards anti-war, because that was a major cultural sentiment at the time of publication, but overall the focus of these games is problem solving together. These game encyclopedias were a major influence for us in thinking about a Northern Spark festival-wide game. ELLE: So with that, describe the game, Collective Action! SARA: (Laughing) We need an elevator pitch! BEN: I’ve got it. So the game, Collective Action!, invites you to visit one of the six game stations around the festival. When you arrive, you log in to the Collective Action! website on your smartphone, which puts you into a digital queue with other potential players at a game location. When you get to the front of the queue, you and other audience members will be called up into the play area to perform some kind of action together, which will give you, your team and your festival neighborhood points. There’s lots of different actions for each location, some of them might relate to water rights, some of them may relate to environmental justice or other Climate Chaos I People Rising topics. For example, you and others from the audience might be invited up to be a rainstorm or imagine what a future water filtration system might look like. Be a glacier that’s calving off into the sea and become icebergs and drifting away from each other. So the actions are meant to be thematic but open, so that you and other people can come together and figure out how you might embody them together.
Read more of the artist interview here on our website and visit http://www.collectiveaction. |
Not just a Launch Party – our only fundraising event of the year!
It is easy to see how this year’s Northern Spark projects are going to enchant and inspire you. They’re the reason we have a Launch Party fundraiser: to make all of this art possible. So join us at 7pm on June 10th for Northern Spark’s only fundraising event of the entire year, and support Northern Spark while you get the night started with a great party! You’ll dance with ZULUZULUU, eat some of the most artistic bites of the summer, and sip on our specialty cocktail, the Spark 75! If you are inspired now, have been in the past, or wish to be in 2017, your Launch Party tickets are waiting. Find them at nspk.mn/launch.
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In the NewsNorthern Spark was recently featured on the Strong Towns podcast! Take a listen here. In the interview, Rachel Quednau chats with Sarah Peters, the Co-Director of the Northern Spark festival, to find out how the event got started, how it has engaged the Twin Cities community, and how the ideas behind Northern Spark can be replicated in other cities to encourage their communities to think creatively about place and use of space. |
