Interview with Andy Wallace
Andy Wallace joins the Taper#12 Editorial Collective. He talks about his journey to Taper and his passion for games, Perlin Noise, and collaboration.
AC: Welcome to the Taper 12 Editorial Collective Andy! We’ve been avid followers of your plotter art and digital art postings for quite some time. It’s a pleasure to have you join our editorial collective. I understand that you’re joining us from Queens in New York City, where you work as a freelance programmer and run your art studio Andy Makes.
Andy: I grew up in New Jersey but attended school in New York. Now, my brother lives in Queens, which feels perfect. While many of my family members are artists, I did not think I would become one while growing up.
AC: What’s your background, and how did you get involved with art?
Andy: Everything began with my passion for video games. When I was young, I knew I wanted to become a game designer. I envisioned working at a major video game studio, and creating games for Nintendo was somewhat of a dream. Shortly after my time at Parsons, I joined Golden Ruby Games, a small game studio. There, I took on the roles of lead designer and programmer, and I’m incredibly proud of the many games I contributed to. Additionally, I taught game design at Long Island University for a period.
During that period, Mark Kleback of Death by Audio approached me to create an arcade machine for one of my games Particle Mace. Collaborating with him, we brought that arcade machine to life. Subsequently, Death by Audio Arcade evolved into its own collective, and I transitioned into an indie game designer. Witnessing people engage with my creations in a live arcade setting was a revelation — I fell in love with it. While digital downloads are cool, there’s something uniquely awesome about watching folks enthusiastically play on an arcade machine. Nowadays, I dabble in a whole array of quirkier projects while also doing freelance programming on the side.
AC: We appreciate the diversity in your creative endeavors. These days, your work extends well beyond games. Notably, your plotter designs have garnered a substantial fanbase. Additionally, I’ve observed your involvement across a wide spectrum of disciplines, including art installations, literature, programming, engineering, and physical design.
Andy: I started messing around in Flash in late high school and early college. And there’s just so much cool stuff happening online then. There were all these people making really weird, interesting things. And that kind of stuff really piqued my interest. Then after computer science undergrad, I got my MFA in design and technology from Parsons, which also opened up my own understanding of what I could do and what I could make. It also gave me foundation of very solid design principles. It was kind of the first time in my life I was asking, Why do I want to make certain things?
My artistic practice spiraled out from that. It all started with games and then these other interesting things would kind of get stuck on there. I’ve learned that I can program to do these various interesting things. At first, I thought I was programming just to make games, but then I found I could make lots of interesting interactive art, some of which are games, some of which aren’t. I was just playing in that space and it fostered a desire to create interactive art.
When I was working on arcade games, I really enjoyed watching people interact with the art. So my work evolved to be more physical. Speaking of which, I just got back from this music and games festival in DC where we bring all the arcade machines and it runs for like 72 hours straight.
AC: Were you really up for 72 hours?
Andy: No, I did sleep. I saw the sunrise once or twice, but I did sleep. We were there running games and being a part of games. But luckily there were a lot of us, so we did sleep. We set it all up and made sure that everything stayed on. We do that every year and that’s sort of the the vibe of the arcade. A lot of my projects are these kind of weird in-person games that can’t exist anywhere else. And it’s a lot of fun to make those and see people play them.
AC. How did you become involved with Taper?
Andy: So basically during the pandemic, I had a friend who started tweeting out processing sketches with tweet lengths of 280 characters. People have been doing this for ages, but I was unaware of it. I thought that was cool and got really into it, including enjoying PICO-8 tweet carts. I started making them too. I was tweeting 2–3 of these #tweetcarts everyday. I knew Nick Montfort and heard him talking about Taper and thought, surely I can do something in 2048. That’s almost 10 times more space so I thought I’d submit something.
AC: Your first piece, “Night Voyagers,” for Taper#7: Wonders looked like nothing else we’d ever seen before. You used type as a monochromatic visual element, visually generating prose and then wiping it away on a fluidly flowing landscape. Every piece we’ve seen after, we’ve wondered what you’ll submit next.
Andy: Night Voyagers is part procedural animation and part demo-scene; using a plasma field of ASCII characters with rotating orbs. The text came from thinking about who would find these objects and how they would get to this space.
AC: Then in Taper#8:Nostalgia, you submitted “Atari Video Music.” It evokes the spirit of the Atari 2600 console and evolves a star-burst pattern as a backdrop for a nostalgia poem. It was a joy to watch the cascade of light scan colors across text, generating different textures.
Andy: In my 20s I became aware of Atari Video Music just as my interest in creative code was blossoming. It felt so strange that it would ever have been made, but the visuals were entrancing. The fidelity was as low as my 2600, but the movement felt lively in a way I never would have expected from that console. It gave me a whole new respect for the hardware and the people who developed it.
AC: That piece was so different from the interactivity and visual quality of the Hitomezashi patterns in “Consciousness Transferral Procedure (Hour 41)” in Taper#:9 Lives. It’s a short sci-fi story about consciousness trapped between vessels.
Andy: I enjoy using procedural generation to create organic movements and patterns. I even gave a lecture on Perlin Noise at NYU where Ken Perlin came. This is like years ago now, like 5 or 6 years ago at NYU and Ken Perlin showed up. It was wild.
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AC: There’s also “Exponential Containment,” in Taper#10: Powers of Ten. I spent so many days playing it because it was so enjoyable. That was a new spin on an old favorite game, and the fun step was figuring out the rules behind it. Then there was the actual gameplay, which was just on the edge of hard so there it kept me coming back to play.
Andy: It is a puzzle that is part rules puzzle and part enigma. I wasn’t sure that one was gonna get in I submitted and I was like I don’t know that I don’t know if this is what Taper is looking for.
AC: All of your pieces have been so different from each other, and stand out for their unique approach to implementing engineering and aesthetics to the topic. What have you been working on recently?
Andy: I’m really excited by this war game called Skirmish Society, which is one of my biggest projects in a while. It is a big networked war game that lives on your Discord server. You install a Discord bot and it runs the game. It is inspired by Diplomacy and allows you and your friends to conquer a dynamic world. together.
AC: I see collaboration as a core part of your work. I remember seeing a lifesized negotiation game called Fuzzy Borders that you ran was a physical game with people negotiating boundaries.
Andy: Yes, I love to collaborate. There are two main groups I’m a part of that I just want to quickly mention, as they are probably the things I’m most excited about right now. The first is the EMMA Technology Cooperative. Currently, my day job revolves around being a part of this technology cooperative.
We are a worker-owned co-op specializing in tech freelance work. Being part of this organization has been incredibly exciting for me because it aligns with my political aspirations, something I’ve never experienced in a job before. We offer services for freelance tech work, conduct engaging workshops, and create innovative installations. Personally, I have a passion for giving workshops on game design.
The second group is Arcade Commons, formerly known as Death by Audio Arcade. It has been my creative haven for over a decade. We have been making arcade games for ages. We’ve worked on pinball machines, arcade machines, and all sorts of immersive arcade experiences.
Among our projects, I’d like to mention Circumnavigators, which I created with Juno Moro. Picture an arcade game that defies convention — no screen, no pixels, just a strip of LEDs encircling a bin. Perched atop this luminous ring are buttons, inviting players to explore uncharted territories. There’s no actual screen, players have to navigate by exploring though sound and touch.
Salmon Roll: The Upstream Team, is another game I created with Jane Friedhoff and Diego Garcia. We crafted a large five-foot-long wooden controller that two people hold simultaneously to play the game. Two players collaborate to steer a salmon through perilous waters as it swims upstream to its nest.
AC: Thank you for the recommendations. Also, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about your trajectory from game design to artist. We hope to see more of your work. Where can we find out more about what you’re up to?
Andy: You can find more of my portfolio work at andymakes. com. Also check out my mastodon, and Tumblr feeds.
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