In 2025 Sickhouse will have a new location and we are commissioning our first alternative arcade! Dutch artists Vincent Schoutsen and Wouter van Veldhoven are joining forces with the French artists Leon Denise and Emilie Breslavetz from in.controlab, to develop and build a playful arcade machine.

In 2025 Sickhouse will have a new location and we are commissioning our first alternative arcade! 

Dutch artists Vincent Schoutsen and Wouter van Veldhoven are joining forces with French artists Leon Denise and Emilie Breslavetz from 

, to develop and build a playful arcade machine. Reflecting on the theme "Alternative control and Resistance" they are working together to create an arcade that will be playable at the new location of Sickhouse .

January and February are the months for creative brainstorms, starting with many ideas and getting inspired by their favorite objects. From buttons to plane cockpits, from sci-fi adventure to A.I relationships, the artists question the found objects they are working with, the role of the future player and the state of new technology in our society. 

In March, the 4 artists will be in Enschede for one week to bring everything together and build the arcade. They will present their process and progress during our monthly meet-up 

at BlackBrick.

The Arcade will be officially inaugurated in SFebruary, during the re-opening of Sickhouse in its new location! This project is a pilot edition and hopefully we will be able to commission several alternative arcades in the years to come.

Arcade Mayhem

The Global Game Jam took place from January 24 to 26. This year's theme was “Bubbles”. Sickhouse hosted a hub, and the result were six incredible bubbly games!

From January 24th to 26th, the Global Game Jam took place. The theme of this year was ‘Bubble’. So, all over the world, almost half a million game makers, programmers, designers, creatives and curious people came together to create, share and inspire each other in a very bubbly edition.

Sickhouse set up a venue for the jam to take place in Enschede in GrensFrequentie - a working place for musicians and entrepreneurs with spaces available for rent.  People from different cities and various backgrounds came together and created six staggering games!

Don't pop and don't stop! Bublo is a roguelite game about creating as many bubble gum bubbles as you can without popping them. The goal is to collect as many points as you can; the bigger the bubble, the more points you get. You can also get coins to buy upgrades, like extra strength for your bubble gum or blowing speed. This game was created in HTML.

This addictive brain-rot game is created to satisfy the urge to destroy freshly created (evil) bubbles with different shapes inside them. Inspired by the satisfaction of popping bubbles, whether plastic or soap. The sound is great! This game was made in HTML with the assistance of ChatGPT.

BUBBLE RAGE - by PAKO, YUXUAN, LUUKAS & PABLO

The biggest booming bubble battle! An arcade game for two players, one creates bubbles from a canister and the other chews and blows gum. Match the size of the bubble with the target, and win! This game is made in Godot Engine.

This augmented drinking game investigates why grocery prices have inflated into unaffordable price-bubbles. With a barcode scanner as your controller, this game is perfect for getting drunk while lamenting capitalism with your friends. Made in HTML.

A game of willpower; you play in bubbly world where you can try to resist popping the bubbles! This game was created in Bitsy Engine.

Space Bug is a platformer where you need to jump over various bubbles and reach the sun! It’s made in Game Builder Garage for Nintendo Switch.


You can play some of these games in the upcoming edition of COLLIDERS next Thursday, 

 to be part of COLLIDERS community and receive a monthly newsletter.

Global Game Jam 2025 (RECAP)

Each year, the Sickhouse program is guided by a research theme. This year, we want to take a risk and accept the challenge of staying in bed, under the covers, with our heads buried in the pillows.

Return to Dreamland, From #CalmTok to Rest as Resistance

In 2025 following the progress of our reflection on play and activism, in the context of a hyper productive society, long conflicts, climate catastrophes, engulfing A.I, we want to take the risk, the counter intuitive move, the challenge to stay in bed, under the blanket, heads in the pillow. If new technologies infiltrate our beds to transform it into data to be mined, XR technologies, video games and virtual environments are also relevant media when delving into dreamworlds. This new edition wants to be another chapter of resistance where we self-organise to wander, dream, let our subconscious meet, invite our nightmares in...

The year program of Sickhouse and its main guest artists will be the leading process to develop the research and the selection for the festival.

* JANA ROMANOVA (https://janaromanova.com/)
“Shall these remain only dreams? we said. Shall we not bring these things into wakeful beings?” Ursula K. Le Guin in Changing planes : Social dreaming of the Frin.

Jana Romanova, LARP designer, is invited to design new playful experiences based on collective dreams, role-playing and dream-building experience that explores the boundaries between reality and imagination. At its core, the "DreamWalks" is about creating and inhabiting collective imaginary spaces—something akin to sharing a dream or a hallucination with others.

DreamWalk #1 : KristalBath - Sunday 9-03
DreamWalk #2 : Flying Field - Saturday 29-03
DreamWalk #3 : Walk in the ParQ - Thursday 24-04
DreamWalk #4 : to be announces

*SONDI (Link.tree)
“Wherever they stood it came, suddenly and simultaneously: refusal, refusal, refusal. And in a gust they collapsed into sleep.”
Sondi in Mbombo-Dream Echo.

In the second part of the year we are inviting Sondi to create an immersive set-up for her games “Mbombo-Dream Echo” and “Sleep On It”. The set-up/playground is meant to become a collective space for daydreaming, reinventing hybrid places of rest. Mbombo builds on years of research into the nature of rest and dreaming as radical forms of resistance against capital, colonial violence on the Black body. (concept formalised and put into embodied practice by Tricia Hersey in her Nap Ministry and her book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.)

*JANNE SCHIMMEL (https://janneschimmel.com/)
“Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.” Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

In the third part of the year Sickhouse is inviting Janne Schimmel to dive into nightmare references and hack a game device to navigate them, in hybrid ways mixing sensorial experience and digital storytelling. Curious about the ambiguous space, nightmares create for fantasy and pleasure.

Exhausted, Burned out, anxious, overwhelmed are now recurrent adjectives we associate with our daily life and our work environments. Technology coming to save us is now selling us “digital rest points’, ‘CalmTok’,’ Raw-dogging a flight’ ‘Pokemon Sleep app’ to track our sleep and for the best ‘Sleep Tourism’ hotels with VR lucid dreams experiences...

Rest is resistance but it is under attack, our escape is already trapped. Beyond the idea of healthiness, The Overkill wants to look at rest as an act of refusal, a protest against efficiency, productivity, or even this monetised idea of a better version of ourselves.

Theme 2025 : Return to Dreamland

2024 was a nomadic year for Sickhouse, but it was also a year of playful resistance with an Overkill to remember. Here you can read the summary of the year.



Here comes the last newsletter of the year, to wish you all beautiful holidays and announce a few dates for 2025.
The team of Sickhouse is incredibly proud and thankful for all the support it receive this year while being without a fixed home! While we were struggling to make space for our alternative ways of doing art, Sickhouse community, local partners and international playful friends made sure we could present, exchange, produce and that meant everything.

* We also especially want to thank our volunteers that followed us in the multiple location we hosted our program, that stayed enthusiastic and helpful, adapting all the time and making these places home for the community! THANK YOU! *

In this newsletter,

Look back on 2024, RADICAL JOY RESISTANCE

We wish you all beautiful celebration days, may you be with love ones and playful ones!


In 2024, with the theme RADICAL JOY RESISTANCE Sickhouse has been looking into the role of playfulness in movements of resistance.

 presented artists playing around with their hardware, questioning control, purposes and material. With 

Bearwarp - Silvia Binda Heiserova - Emilie Breslavetz - Leon Denise - Dorian Rigal - Vincent Schoutsen - Wouter van Veldhoven - Tijmen Zonnevijlle



Over the summer we invited artists to host LARP sessions 

 to engage in complex situations while taking on new roles. Designed by 



In September the interactive and performative installation 

, invited visitors and the local queer community to explore what their collective voice could express. Presented by 

.

In October, the immersive exhibition of 

 invited players to get lost and navigate, float, swim or dive in between all directions. Installation from 

Through this program we asked ourselves what or whom we are resisting and how we are integrating resistance in our lives, what spaces do we take, what shapes can it take… It brought us to places of weakness, intimacy, awkwardness, sadness, where play could almost always find room.

Empowered by this research we wanted 

 to be a moment to bring people together, a moment to rethink our way to take space, an event allowing planned but also spontaneous gathering to arise… The program has been set-up to showcase diverse testimony of resistance while giving the visitors tools to share their own stories.

From the performance with 

 to the March of resistance, the opening has been an incredible moment to recognise the power of play and the strength of this community.

Poetry is an important aspect that connected many moments of the festival, letting chosen words, random associations, foreign sentences give a certain lightness to our acts of resistance.

Addressing the role and the responsibilities of the game industry and art world in the violent context the society finds itself in, was also an important objective for our organisation. And the festival has been a way to step up and stand stronger.



Looking forward to start 2025 and plan the great move to our new location, we are happy, proud and thankful to share that Sickhouse will be supported by the 

De zeggingskracht en oorspronkelijkheid van het programma worden door de commissie hoog gewaardeerd. Het spreekt veel energie uit het voorstel. Het programma wordt door de commissie als voorbeeldstellend gezien voor de manier waarop de nieuwste generatie makers op een vanzelfsprekende manier eclectische programma’s samenstelt.

The committee highly values ​​the expressiveness and originality of the programme. It expresses a lot of energy in the proposal. The committee sees the programme as an example of the way in which the latest generation of makers naturally composes eclectic programmes.

"

quote from the Stimuleringsfonds committee review.

Good Bye 2024 (Newsletter)

Sickhouse celebrated their sixth anniversary and it was fun! Without a physical space to gather, Sickhouse is looking for different ways to be present, support its community and share playfulness. 

Sickhouse celebrated their sixth anniversary and it was fun! 

Without a physical space to gather, Sickhouse is looking for different ways to be present, support its community and share playfulness. This is why we are publishing a magazine, to find you again, share some thoughts and take you on the new reflective theme for this year.

At the start of 2024, Sickhouse does not have a space to present and host its program. Finding a new location is a challenge we have been working on since a few years but the last months have shown how difficult the path towards a fitting space is. And we are not alone in this struggle, revealing a great fragility within the cultural middle field of Enschede.

One could wonder why Sickhouse needs a space, when it could be nomad, presents programs within the institutions Enschede/The Netherlands already has, rent a desk in one of the few co-work spaces of the city, mingle with entrepreneurs, free itself from the burden of rent and focus all its budget on content.

But this position fails to see that the large part of Sickhouse’s content is its community. The programs centre around the encounter, the gathering. Designing and crafting its physical space allows  Sickhouse’s visitors to feel safe,  encourages experiment and supports diversified encounters. As a playful art space, Sickhouse does not only support the makers of games or interactive art, it actively uses play as a means to engage in the difficult discussions we urgently need to have in times of polarisation.

One could argue that, as specialised in video games and virtual spaces, Sickhouse could gather online and again free itself from the burden of a physical space. That’s something Sickhouse definitely explored, in the times of the pandemic and when hosting hybrid events. It has been challenging, it has been fun, it needs time, it needs courage and it needs a solid base.

Sickhouse continues to work on such online spaces, trying to find the right balance between the gathering and the playground open to our (international) community. But when our ambition is to support the construction of bridges between virtual and physical, such space can not live alone. The ways to inhabit the world are neither online or offline anymore but in hybrid and layered realities. As an experimental space, Sickhouse is actively reflecting, supporting and creating new navigation systems.

But what physical room, alternative organisations, artists based communities or experimental programs can find, in a realty market at the hand of private owners, rich real estate developers, multinational retail companies? Confronted with this reality, Sickhouse is wondering what impact eternal temporality would have? When we want to create rooms from the glitches, what is stability? Not forgetting that the struggles inherent to alternative, critical, queer, underground spaces are political choices, we are creating our path of resistance. When our societies are dealing with one crisis after another, symptoms of hurtful politics and an economy based on inequality, Sickhouse creates critical and caring programs supporting deeper transformations.

At the time of writing this editorial, Sickhouse is working on its next temporary situation and it will be fine and it will open soon. In 2024 the city is implementing the new “culture nota” and if we believe culture needs more fundamental support, these steps, that many of us worked on with the Gemeente, are promising and hopeful. Finishing this editorial on a positive note is not a way to ignore the situation the world is in, it is an invitation to consider resilience, hope, care, patience as significant tools in a movement that demands a lot of endurance.

SICKHOUSE 6 (RECAP)

Diving in the internet like we would explore a swamp, scared, curious, wet and dirty, expecting monsters and searching for forgotten treasures. We will bring in this research the context of our climate crises, the last transformation of our digital culture through AI.

Last week's Wednesday, we presented our research theme for the year: The Outburst of the Digital Swamp...
“The swamp is meta. The swamp is dangerous and beautiful, an ecological ignored paradise and the home of unknown and potentially dangerous species. The swamp smells, it drips on our keyboards, it creates short circuits. The swamp is full of stories, rumours and tales, floating between traditional legends and memes culture.”

Diving in the internet like we would explore a swamp, scared, curious, wet and dirty, expecting monsters and searching for forgotten treasures. We will bring in this research the context of our climate crises, the last transformation of our digital culture through AI, follow the tangible cables of our internet, unfold social media trends and their influence on our behaviours....

The results and findings of this research will come together at our yearly event The Overkill Festival, taking place from the15th to the 19th of November! Save the date! 

Articles

Arcade Mayhem

Global Game Jam 2025 (RECAP)

Theme 2025 : Return to Dreamland

Good Bye 2024 (Newsletter)

SICKHOUSE 6 (RECAP)

Theme 2023 The Outburst of the digital Swamp