Climate Carnival

Northern Spark Art Festival 2016

Climate Carnival was an interactive public art installation for the 2016 Northern Spark Art Festival, featuring a series of 5 carnival games designed around the festival theme of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising.

Circus tent lit up against evening sky. In foreground, a person riding a stationary bike looks toward a board of lightbulbs wired to the bike; people in background play a crane game.

Carnival games offered festival attendees a playful way to engage with the loaded concept of anthropogenic impacts on the planet’s ecology.

Festival goers could pluck ocean plastic with a crane game, pedal an electric bike to see how much human power it takes to illuminate LED vs incandescent bulbs, try their luck with recyclable-sorting plinko, test their zero-waste chops at the trash toss, and envision the impact of ocean waste with orca skeeball.

Mill Ruins district of Minneapolis in background, with lit-up signs for Gold Medal Flour and North Star Blankets. In foreground, crowd gathers around different art installations including a circus tent lined with lights and colored penants.

The Northern Spark art festival was an all-night arts festival organized by Northern Lights.mn from 2011-2021. Each year featured a distinct unifying theme and was held in a different Twin Cities neighborhood.

The 2016 festival was held in the Mill Ruins area of Minneapolis and featured 43 projects around the theme of Climate Chaos | Climate Rising. The festival was attended by 34,000 people, and garnered over 182,000 unique website visits and 29 million media impressions.

Climate Carnival was invited to re-exhibit our project at Summer4Play, a festival replay event in July 2016.

9 people all dressed in white shirts with red bowties are lined up on front of an ocean-themed skeeball game with a large model of a whale as the skeeball target

Climate Carnival was developed by the Yes, Let’s! design collective, which grew out of the Product Design community of practice at the University of Minnesota. Collective members are past or current students, or industry supporters of the program.

Yes, Let’s! is a multidisciplinary collective with an improvisational approach, and encompasses arts, design, science and engineering, education, theater, and other fields of practice.

A large model of an orca whale sits on the floor in a workshop space in front of a group of people who appear to be having a brainstorming meeting.

The collective’s work on Climate Carnival included everything from artistic concept, game design, prototyping, and fabrication, to experience and event design and logistics. We collaborated with our creative network, including some generous artist peers at Can Can Wonderland, to source unique materials, including a large model orca and a crane game. We also fabricated original game assets, like the plinko game and skeeball ramp, from scratch.

Event proposals, operating budgets, rental and transport logistics, set-up and tear-down, and event staffing were coordinated by us, with day-of volunteer support from other U of M design students and alums.

A festival attendee cheers in front of a plinko game framed by a lit-up circus tent, while a photographer and circus host look on.

Northern Spark event photos courtesy of Northern Lights.mn. For more event photos and project details, see the archived festival website.

Solstice Box

Night Picnic