At Wonderville, nine games replaced the gamepad entirely
The second annual Alt.Ctrl Festival ran Sunday in Bushwick — free, city-backed, and closing with a choral work scored for stepper motors.
Wonderville ran its second annual Alt.Ctrl Festival on Sunday at the bar on Broadway in Bushwick—nine games in the gallery from 2pm, six performances on the stage from 7pm, free, and folded into the city's Summer of Games program through the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment.
Some great projects in the mix here. Tesla Tears: Accelerate on the Tears of the Exploited came from Jonah Brucker-Cohen, who has been building interfaces since the era when net.art and hardware hacking were the same sentence. Dear Anna is by Bijan Stephen (Killscreen alum!) and Eden Rohatensky. Hold On, New York! is Lingwu Li and Vedang Lambe of NYU's ITP program; Prep 'n' Serve is Karlo de Leon; Succulent Drive USA is Tyler Rhodes; Spin to Win is Joseph Owen; Phone Games is Tea Reggi.
Hold On, New York!
Friends in Knead by James Kelleher, Michael Nadav, Betty Zhang, and Ran Xu
We have been circling this for a decade. In 2016 we ran a piece on alternative controllers as a design practice, and more recently on what happens when 100 strangers share one. The through-line is that the gamepad is a settled argument nobody agreed to, and a stepper motor is a perfectly good instrument.
The announcement went up days before the doors, which is roughly how this scene works. Applications for next year presumably open when they open.
Nine makers building physical interfaces in one Brooklyn bar, and almost none of them get written about anywhere. Killscreen’s free newsletter is where we keep the list.
