Repair Acts

What Remains Workshop with Marloes de Valk

Location

Pervasive Media Studio, 1 Canon’s Road

Bristol, BS1 5TX

Cost: Free but places limited to 15

Materials need: Laptop with Twine downloaded (no programming skills required)

Booking necessary via: What Remains, Repair Acts 2019

About

This workshop deals with the things we don’t get to repair and possible responses to this. Amazon destroys unsold items at a massive scale, according to an undercover report from French M6’s Capital. Earlier a similar report came from German Frontal 21 TV show summer 2018. Waste turned out to be financially more efficient than having unsold products in stock. Amazon is far from alone. Burberry, Cartier, Nike, Louis Vuitton, H&M and others, all destroy products in order to maintain exclusivity through scarcity, other brands incinerate because recycling is more expensive. Waste-to-energy, harvesting the energy released through burning perfectly usable products, is an unconvincing justification.

Investigate possible critical, poetic and playful responses to these issues with Dutch media artist, Marloes de Valk.

The workshop will be structured as a game jam using the open-source software Twine. Participants will explore ways in which such values have become normalized that allow business practices such as those of Amazon to continue? Is there a certain vocabulary associated with these values? Can we tell short stories and create simple games that reflect upon this?

The workshop opens with an introduction about a game project by Marloes de Valk called ‘What Remains‘, an 8-bit game for the emblematic 1985 NES console, blending visual novel and adventure elements in a story translating real events from the 80s into an epic quest to save the world. Participants will read/play some Tw ine games/stories for inspiration, discuss the topic to pinpoint a few interesting angles for our game jam, after which Marloes will introduce you to the basics of Twine and get you started on your story.

Basic Twine features will be used to draft a short story. The workshop is accessible to everyone, no technical background is needed.

Twine

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. It is very accessible, you don’t need to write any code to create a simple story. You can however extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready. Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Schedule

13.00 – 13.30 Introduction and presentation by Marloes on her latest

project, What Remains.

13.30 – 13.45 Playing some games for inspiration.

13.45 – 14.15 Short introduction to Twine.

= 15 minutes break =

14.30 – 14.45 Break into small groups/teams and examine a question