Alan Kwan rebuilt Scent with a rock-ing controller

Alan Kwan spent eight years making Scent, a 15-to-20-minute game in which you are a stray dog gathering the souls of the dead in an unnamed city while a massacre unfolds around you. This summer the game became a room. In the documentation Kwan posted from SENTIENTS, the exhibition that ran at Undershed—Watershed's immersive gallery in Bristol—from July 18 through September 13, the game sits inside a scenic installation built, in Kwan's words, to evoke "quiet nature enveloped by war and darkness." One visitor plays. Everyone else watches it as cinema.

Kwan made a controller from an actual rock, wired up and weighing more than five kilograms, so the hands holding it grip a piece of nature while the screen shows atrocity. The staging also solves a problem game exhibitions rarely solve: a single-player game becomes a spectator form through architecture rather than through streaming. Kwan has run the same logic in the other direction too, playing Scent live on cinema screens as a performance, steering the dog and choreographing the camera at once.

Kwan wrote about the game for Killscreen last year—why a dog, why on-rails, why you can do nothing—and named witnessing without power as the whole point. SENTIENTS itself is a show we covered when it opened: six Bristol teenagers co-curated it, placing Kwan alongside Marshmallow Laser Feast, Alice Bucknell, Demelza Kooij, and David O'Reilly.

The Bristol run is over, but the installation is the version to chase. Since the Tribeca Festival premiered it in 2025, the game has moved through Vilnius, Baltimore, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid, and the room keeps being rebuilt. Somewhere, eventually, a rock is waiting for you.