Joystick

A joystick is a navigation device. A selection device. An orientation device. A pleasure device.
Madison Bycroft's “Joystick” play environment is an invitation to unlearn everything we know about finding our way. With patience and curiosity and no goals, wander through a fantastic flooded world made of collages. In Joystick, orientation and intentions are not static, they change depending on our location, the weather, sea level and other environmental factors in the game.

You may encounter one of the seven bosses that populate the islands. Each of them sings a song about their location (Up, Down, Beside, In Front, Behind, Elsewhere and In Between).

In this work, the player/viewer uses a custom game-controller that has two joysticks and one button.

Joystick is a participatory multi-channel project, created during 2021 - 2024, initially in collaboration with Ubisoft, and Carreau Du Temple.

BIO
Madison Bycroft (they/them), born in 1987 in Tarntanya (Adelaide, Australia), lives and works in Marseille, France and is the tutor of the group FKA Critical Practices at Artez, in Arnhem. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia (2013), the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016), and is currently a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome.

Working with video, sculpture, and performance, Madison Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression, and refusal. The politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how ‘sense’ is framed by historical contexts, biases, and structures of power.

Bycroft is interested in how we might re-imagine “reading” (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as goal-oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and makes space - opaque, errant, fractured, and floating.

Joystick is part of Sickhouse's year research “Radical-Joy-Resistance” exploring the role of play within activism and the power of joy, pleasure, humour in movement of resistance. The results of this research will be presented at The Overkill Festival from 20 to 24 November. (www.theoverkill.nl)

DATES : 28-09 to 24-11
Opening 28-09, 15:00
LOCATION : Concordia Langestraat 56
ACCESS : Free