Distant Bodies & Different Worlds - Worldbuilding Workshop

The three-day workshop Worldbuilding will explore what it means and entails as a maker and a player to step into the frame of the screen, to move between real, virtual, and symbolic worlds. The digital world itself is rooted in the material world but not identical to it. What exactly happens when we transition from one into the other? We will explore the ontological steps that we have to take as a participant to engage our bodies in virtual game worlds.

Through methods of Collective Worlding and Life Action Role Play (LARP), participants will create a Remote Reality Game in which a technological transition from the player’s present world to a digital avatar world is made possible. They will turn the school building into a multilayered gamespace, where players play and are simultaneously played. Participants will learn to deal with the fundamental effect that the introduction of a screen brings into their experience. Exploring the intuitive and spatial ‘world’ in which they are situated in the here-and-now through preliminary observational exercises, and a subjective mapping within ‘cosmograms’ (graphic worldviews), they will set up a narrative context in which these movements between worlds become explicit, and as natural as a classic Fourth Wall situation.

Playfully, participants thus develop a critical understanding of the relationship between people and their digital proxies and learn to generate narrative content and interactive game elements that enable and reflect screen experiences and interaction on multiple levels.

Participants need to bring their smartphone, laptop and headphones (wireless).

Link: special guest presentation by Maarten Francq.

Karin Verelst (RITCS) is a philosopher who went from metaphysics to dramaturgy and from worldviews to worldbuilding. She combines art and science in experimental contexts where the boundaries between ontologies of experience in real and represented worlds are crossed in different technological settings. She co-organised the series of Systems at Play conferences.

Sébastien Hendrickx (KASK) is a performance artist and dramaturge. His works on complex social processes such as the ecological multicrisis or the workings of the legal system, and the emotional impact they can have on individuals. KASK/School of Arts supports his artistic research on cosmograms and ecosystemic narrative structures (2022-2026).

Carina Erdmann (LUCA) works on the intersection of game design and performance, researching role play, and collective worlding as a method to enact critical thought and enable alternative agencies. She investigates improvisation, somatic scores, and dream sharing as communication technologies. Her research project Distant Bodies and Accomplices is supported by LUCA, School of Commons, and a.pass.

David Tann (CEO Arcane Fools) Fool, Court Jester and innovator. Blends creativity, tech, and cybernetics to unlock potential. Founder of Arcane Fools to disrupt conventional thinking through clowning, art, and applied science. Explores AI, self organisation and decentralised systems.

Ash Eliza Smith (Nebraska University) Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts, Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. Worldbuilding, narrative design and Design visualization. Visiting Fellow, Central Saint Martins, MA Narrative Environments, London, England.

With the support of Alliantiefonds EhB-HOGENT

Image: Marijn Degenaar