SPARK #35: Eco-boardgames - Hacking and Jamming

SPARK #35: Eco-boardgames: Hacking and Jamming is a hands-on workshop that explores game-making and play practices as an intervention in addressing climate futures. In this workshop with Dr Jack Warren, we’ll play boardgames, hack them apart, and collaborate to remake them into something that imagines new stories about nature and climate emergencies. All materials will be provided.

This workshop draws on Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake's work about hacking board games to support climate action. They propose that the climate crisis is both a social problem and an imaginative challenge. As game systems are stories, hacking and jamming games offer alternative stories to the extractive and mechanistic understanding of nature that defines ecological and climate crises.

This workshop is organised in collaboration with the Manchester Game Centre, an interdisciplinary research centre at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Dr Jack Warren (he/him) is a Lecturer in Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include video games, media studies, queer studies, and the environmental humanities. Jack has a particular interest in studying role-playing in games and queer play practices and has published several works on role-play, queerness, touch, and affect. He is also the Postgraduate Researcher Lead for the Manchester Game Centre.
https://www.mmu.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-jack-warren

SPARK
The SPARK network was set up by Castlefield Gallery in 2022 to facilitate a Greater Manchester/North West-based network of artists wanting to intervene in the climate crisis. The gallery initiated SPARK in response to the high demand for places on the 2021/22 SUSTAIN programme focussed on low carbon artmaking. 

SPARK #35 follows SPARK sessions at Manchester Art Gallery, Rogue, The Birley (Preston), Eccles Friends Meeting House, Manchester Museum, AIR Gallery, Paradise Works, Editional Studio, Cadishead and Little Woolden Moss, Gallery Oldham, the John Rylands Library, Dunham Massey, Lindow Moss, Castlefield Viaduct, Gallery Oldham, The Atkinson, Castlefield Gallery and Ancoats Central Retail Park; and a 2023-24 group exhibition and events programme at Rogue Studios.

Castlefield Gallery continues to provide admin and co-ordination support via its Artist Environmental Lead, Jane Lawson. https://www.instagram.com/sparkartistsnetwork/

This venue is wheelchair accessible 

See https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/visit-us/ for directions 
and https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk/visit-us/access/ for access info