“A joystick is a navigation device. A selection device, an orientation device, a pleasure device.” The game environment Joystick by Mads Bycroft is an invitation to unlearn everything we think we know about finding our way.
Joystick is part of Sickhouse's year-long research project Radical-Joy-Resistance, which investigates the role of play in activism and the power of joy, pleasure, and humor within movements of resistance.
“A joystick is a navigation device. A selection device, an orientation device, a pleasure device.” The game environment Joystick by Mads Bycroft is an invitation to unlearn everything we think we know about finding our way. With patience and curiosity, and without any goals, you wander through a fantastical flooded world made of collages. Orientation and intention are not fixed in the joystick; they shift depending on location, weather, sea level, and other environmental factors in the game.
You may encounter one of the seven bosses that inhabit seven islands. Each sings a song about their location: Above, Below, The Side, The Front, The Back, Elsewhere, and The Middle.
In this work, the player/viewer uses a custom game controller with two joysticks and one button. Joystick is a participatory, multi-channel project created between 2021 and 2024, initially in collaboration with Ubisoft and Carreau Du Temple.
The Overkill Festival
Joystick is part of Sickhouse's year-long research Radical-Joy-Resistance, exploring play in activism and the role of joy, pleasure, and humor in resistance movements. The results of this research will be presented from 20 to 24 November at The Overkill Festival.
Madison Bycroft
Working with video, sculpture, and performance, Madison Bycroft's current interests extend to forms of reading, writing, expression, and refusal. The politics of legibility and illegibility are explored through language and material, questioning how “meaning” is framed by historical contexts, biases, and power structures.
Bycroft is interested in how we might reconceive “reading” in a broader sense, not as goal-oriented performance but as a floating, open-ended relationship that allows space—opaque, wandering, fractured, and suspended.
Madison Bycroft (she/they), born in 1987 in Tarntanya (Adelaide, Australia), lives and works in Marseille, France, and teaches in the FKA Critical Practices group at Artez, Arnhem.
Bycroft graduated from the University of South Australia (2013), the MFA program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016), and is currently a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome.