The Limits of Our World:
LARP and Design

A day of talks and conversation exploring the potential of LARP (live-action role-play) and its relationship to design and public life.

Imagine living inside a videogame. You embody a character, wear their clothes, take on their burdens, interact with others as them, live a life through them. Larping is like playing a video or board game. But in a LARP (live-action role-play), you actually do it.

For some, LARP offers a way to temporarily detach from the real-world. These are worlds in which space-making, storytelling and community come together in a world within the world. They are intimate, collective, political. Larping engages both body and mind in exercises of immersion and artificiality, imagination and creativity. LARP creates situations in which you can perceive the world from the point of view of somebody else.

LARP, architecture, design and art share the same ground: they imagine and make real alternate realities through physical, material, verbal, and visual techniques.

This event explores the potential of LARP. Can a well-designed LARP offer new ways to explore radical ideas? Could the tools and techniques used in LARP design challenge the assumptions in mainstream design fields? Can LARP be a vehicle towards a more speculative approach to public life? Could role-play offer clues as to new ways of relating to one another?

Schedule

When: 11.00-16.00 – December 10, 2022
Where: ArkDes (follow signs from the lobby)
Language: English
Free of charge

Refreshments available from 10.30

11.00-11.15: Introduction by James Taylor-Foster (ArkDes)

11.15: Anna Westerling (Stockholm)

11.30: Philip Tomei (London)

11:45: Sagalinn Tangen, Leon Krosness (Stockholm)

12:00: Simone C. Niquille / Technoflesh (Amsterdam)

12.15-13.00: Discussion moderated by Svante Helmbæk Tirén

14.00: Omsk Social Club (Berlin)

14.20: Trojan Horse (Helsinki)

14:40: Terry Nguyen (New York City)

15:00-16.00: Discussion moderated by Alice Shulman

Top image: Osmk Social Club, Dead Air (2018)

The following timestamps relate to the event recording below:

00.00: Introduction by James Taylor-Foster (ArkDes)

00:15: Anna Westerling (Stockholm)

00:30: Philip Tomei (London)

00:47: Sagalinn Tangen, Leon Krosness (Stockholm)

01:00: Simone C. Niquille / Technoflesh (Amsterdam)

01:13: Discussion moderated by Svante Helmbæk Tirén

02:00: Omsk Social Club (Berlin)

02:26: Trojan Horse (Helsinki)

02:45: Terry Nguyen (New York City)

03:04: Discussion moderated by Alice Shulman

About the speakers

Anna Westerling

Anna Westerling is an event manager and game designer who has specialised in mixing larp with other artforms. She has designed larps such as A Nice Evening with the Family, Lovestories by ABBA, Sense and Sensibility, Love and War and Fortune & Felicity. She has produced events such as Stockholm Scenario Festival, Knutpunkt as well as the book Nordic larp. Westerling runs her own PR and Event company and works with creating events and interactive experiences within the games and culture sector, with clients such as Free League Publishing, The Royal Opera, The Swedish Parliament, The National Theatre Company and more.

Simone C Niquille / Technoflesh

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher based in Amsterdam. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity and the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at HeK-Haus der Elektronischen Künste (2020), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), La Gaite Lyrique (2019). She has published writing in Volume Magazine, AD Architecture and e-flux. She is Chief Information Officer at Design Academy Eindhoven. Currently she is investigating the architectural and bodily consequences of computer vision, researching the politics of synthetic training datasets.

Sagalinn Tangen

Sagalinn Tangen (she/they) is a second generation larper and larp designer. They are especially interested in the meeting of story and embodied experience, as well as the potential of intergenerational storytelling. She has written and designed larps since the age of seventeen, and is currently mostly active in the international Nordic larp scene as a member of the design collective Avalon Larp Studio. Once upon a time, they were an architect student for two years, before moving on to other adventures. Today, she works as a project manager and event coordinator, and majors in literature studies at Uppsala University.

Leon Krosness

Leon Krosness is a member of the collective Dagfiket at Kafé 44 in Stockholm where he cooks and serves food. When he’s not at the café he is working on musical art project entitled Träet-Mund-Spilli. He has worked at Studiefrämjandet as a larp instructor.

Terry Nguyen

Terry Nguyen is a critic and journalist writing about culture and technology. She is the senior staff writer at Dirt, a daily newsletter and Web3 media company, and previously wrote for The Goods at Vox. Her writing has been published in New York Magazine, Washington Post, Vice, Rolling Stone, among other publications.

Omsk Social Club

Omsk Social Club’s work is created between two lived worlds, one of life as we know it and the other of role play. These worlds bleed into one. That is where Omsk positions their speculative fictions, through these immersive installations they move into a territory they coined in 2017 called Real Game Play (RGP). Their work aims to induce states that could potentially be a fiction or a yet, unlived reality.

Omsk works closely with networks of viewers, everything is unique and unrehearsed. The living installations they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences and political phenomena. Allowing the works to become a dematerialized hybrid of modern-day culture alongside the participant’s unique personal experiences. In the past Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play immersive environments have introduced landscapes and topics such as otherkin, rave culture, survivalism, catfishing, desire&sacrifice, positive trolling, algorithmic strategies and decentralized cryptocurrency.

Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse is an autonomous educational platform based in Helsinki. Trojan Horse organizes summer schools, live-action role-plays, workshops and reading circles exploring the boundaries and preconditions that define the field where architects, designers, and artists operate today. In this event Trojan Horse is represented by:

Kaisa Karvinen is a Helsinki-based architect and writer interested in the intersections of performativity, public space and collective unlearning. Kaisa’s practice consists of different forms of constructing and writing, usually in multidisciplinary groups.

Tommi Vasko is a Helsinki based graphic designer who writes theoretical and fictional texts about design practices of the near future and about visual phenomena rising between emerging information technologies and ecological thinking.

About the moderators

Svante Helmbæk Tirén

Svante Helmbaek Tirén is a “one-stop-shop” working as a curator, writer, editor, drag queen, performance artist, moderator and teacher in both historic and contemporary art and architectural conservation. His main interest revolves around ephemeral cultural phenomena and the history of ornament and decorative arts. Recurring themes in his projects are reception and performativity theory, the relationships between various subcultures and the mainstream and the historiography of art.

Alice Shulman

Alice Shulman, born in Kyiv, Ukraine, has a fashion background from both Beckman’s College of Design in Stockholm and Central Saint Martins in London. She is currently the Head of Creative Initiatives & Collaborations at Weekday and prior Head of Womenswear. Alice previously worked at Acne Studios. She has a strong drive within the field of contemporary and youth culture. With curiosity to understand society and the needs of the young generation, her intention is to help to drive social and sustainable change.

Watch and Chill: Streaming Senses is a unique hybrid on/offline presentation of visual works by artists from around the world. Drop-in to screenings all day on December 2nd, 2022.

Under the theme of digital sensoria and its symbiosis today, Watch and Chill streams works from around 20 artists in the different regions, while simultaneously showcasing them in physical spaces as internationally travelling exhibitions.

On both the online platform and the offline presentation, works respond to the relationship between technology and human perceptual systems. They consist of four sub-topics: Optical Tactility, Calibrated Projection, Trance, Cross, Move, and Bits of the Spirit.

Screening Schedule

When: December 2, 2022
Where: Biografen, ArkDes/Moderna Museet
Free of charge – drop-in

Bits of the Spirit

Screenings begin at 10.15 in the cinema, level 2

10:15-10:52 – Ahmad Ghossein, The Fourth Stage
10:52-11:03 – Sylbee Kim, Trinity: Finance-Credo-Spirituality
11:03-12:05 – Maha Maamoun, Domestic Tourism II
12:05-12:18 – Kim Woonghyun, Hindenburg Lounge
12:18-12:20 – Andreas Wannerstedt, Proportions—Sliding Zeus XL
12:20-12:30 – Yuri Pattison, sunset provision (status monitor)

Optical Tactility

Starting at 12.30 in the cinema, level 2

12:30-12:52 – Lee Eunhee, HOT/STUCK/DEAD
12:52-13:12 – An Jungju & Jun Sojung, The Ghost in the Machine
13:12-13:31 – Yeom Ji Hye, CyborgHandstanderus’s Nose
13:31-13:34 – Wang & Söderström, Growth
13:34-13:46 – Jenna Sutela, nimiia cétiï, 2018
13:46-13:47 – Andreas Wannerstedt, Layers – The Flow
13:47-14:00 – Yuri Pattison, sunset provision (status monitor)

Calibrated Projection

Starting at 14.00 in the cinema, level 2

14:00-14:18 – Yeom Ji Hye, Future Fever
14:18-14:37 – Basma al Sharif, We Began By Measuring Distance
14:37-14:49 – An Jungju & Jun Sojung, Automatic Autonomy
14:49-15:34 – Sharif Waked, To Be Continued…
15:34-15:45 – Yuri Pattison, sunset provision (status monitor)

Trans, Cross, Move

Starting at 15.45 in the cinema, level 2

15:45-16:12 – Kim Woonghyun, Hell Bovine and Pony
16:12-16:33 – Kim Ayoung, Porosity Valley, Portable Holes
16:33-16:57 – Ali Cherri, The Digger
16:57-17:10 – Simone C. Niquille / Technoflesh, Homeschool
17:10-19:11 – ASMRctica, 2 hrs Climate Zones of the World
19:11-19:41 – Kim Ayoung, In Search of Petra Genetrix

The museum closes at 20.00.