Worldglimpsing

ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut are excited to announce Worldglimpsing: two exhibitions that shine light on the ways in which we inhabit our reality through designed worlds.

Across 2025 and 2027, 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 exhibitions: Our Brood
Conceived and created by OMSK Social Club, Our Brood is an expansive and embodied RGP (“Real Game Play”) experience. Combining 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.

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.

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.