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Exhibitions / Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities

Worldglimpsing

Photo: Reinis Hofmanis. 2011. 'Britta Hoyer as Youa the Manwolf' from the 'LARP' series.
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Hall 1

Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities

Contemporary Design

A collaboration between
ArkDes × Nieuwe Instituut

A first-of-its-kind exhibition to shine light on the ways in which we inhabit our reality through designed worlds.

Worldglimpsing invites you to envision and embody alternate ways of nurturing our identities, our communities, and the planet at large. From live action role play (LARP) and game design to film, animation and avatarism, the exhibition explores social and artistic approaches that are guiding us to other possible futures – today.

Engage with sophisticated worlding efforts that marshal the potential of empathy through speculation and serious play. Outlining an emerging creative field that blends visual art, design, architecture, performance, fashion and more, this participatory exhibition highlights forms of creativity that foreground role play and the design of alternate worlds as civic and political acts. Worldglimpsing introduces you to a series of extraordinary experiments—human, machine, and otherwise—at the bleeding edge of contemporary culture.

At the heart of the exhibition: Our Brood

Conceived and created by OMSK Social Club1, Our Brood is an expansive and embodied RGP (‘Real Game Play’) experience. Combining real-time immersive role play with AI interaction, it explores themes of motherhood and care in the context of ecological and technological crises. Here, the power of play becomes a tool to navigate complex contemporary scenarios. Envision alternate futures of yourself – and the worlds that you design.

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    OMSK Social Club ↗ is a stewarded practice of collective storytelling. It involves a specific immersive improvised methodology, which they coined in 2017 as ‘Real Game Play’, encompassing collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, they harvest media relics such as films, scripts, and large-scale video installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be fiction or an as-of-yet unlived reality. The living installations that they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences, and cautionary tales.

This exhibition opens in October 2025.

ArkDes × Nieuwe Instituut

Worldglimpsing: Role Play and the Design of Alternate Realities is a collaboration between two national museums with a shared focus on investigating an expanded field of design. The first chapter of the exhibition, hosted by ArkDes in Stockholm, will open on October 3, 2025. The second chapter, hosted by the Nieuwe Instituut ↗ in Rotterdam, will open in Autumn 2026.

Logos of ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut

Nieuwe Instituut ↗ is the Netherlands national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture, located in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. Through exhibitions, events, research and other national and international initiatives, they show how design ideas contribute positively to urgent societal and ecological challenges. Nieuwe Instituut is a place where designers, thinkers and the public meet. They manage the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning and the Sonneveld House Museum, an icon of Dutch functionalist architecture dating from 1933.