Wednesday, February 19, 2025, 18h-21h Brussels

aujus will host a playsession of Temporal Worlding by Steph Holl-Trieu & Carina Erdmann, a Remote Reality Game about the temporal relations that shape our lives. In pairs, you will embody a single character split into two bodies: gamer and avatar. Connected through a video call, you go on a walk together, navigating time through voice, movement, and a shared narration. Along the way, you will come to terms with how you perceive time—not only through standardized clock time or your own bodily rhythms, but also through social senses of the future, past, and present.

Send a mail to contact_aujus@proton.me to sign up by Sunday, February 16. Let us know if you’ll be joining in Brussels (in-person) or from elsewhere (remotely). We will match you up.

27 - 31 January, 10:30 - 17:30, LUCA School of Arts, C-Mine Genk

Reframing: Game as Metaphor with Karin Verelst, Carina Erdmann & Steph Holl-Trieu

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. — McKenzie Wark

The workshop will focus on the iterative development of a Remote Reality Game, a format which blends elements of digital gaming and Live Action Role-Playing (LARP). This approach invites participants to critically reflect on the social, emotional, and psychological implications of living in (a) world(s) increasingly mediated by digital technologies.

SUM#23 Tjaša Pogačar, Brandon Rosenbluth

The Politics and Pedagogies of Artistic Role-Play as Collective Becoming - A conversation with Áron Birtalan, Carina Erdmann and OMSK Social Club

In a time marked by rising conservative politics and climate emergency, this conversation interrogates the political and pedagogical promise of role-play as an artistic practice with potential real-world(s) impact. Together with artists Áron Birtalan, Carina Erdmann, and OMSK Social Club, we map out their individual approaches to questions of agency, identity, and collectivity, as well as their situatedness within magick and mysticism, in order to circumscribe a terrain whose power and poetry draws from the blurry boundaries of reality and fiction, life and play—softening the edges of the possible.

12. January 2025, 8:00-10:00 pm CET

Guided Session #5 – Mumble Play by Elbe Trakal

For five years I have recorded myself mumbling dreams I just woke up from. I have used these recordings in therapy, for poetry, and performance writing. In this session I want to work with mumble dream voices to roleplay characters in a dream.

When you wake from a dream, record your voice half asleep re-narrating the dream. Bring one sample. We will listen to our mumbling recordings during the session. Using Roleplay we will enact one dream as mumble characters. The dream world is no stronghold for coherent speech and logic. We will not depend on them. Come tired!

Elbe Trakal is a writer and researcher fascinated by what produces subjects in the here and now, the ideologies, the stories, and the collective thrust. His participatory dream score Under the covers, the waves! (2021) in collaboration with Jack Hogan was shown at the 7th Athens Biennial. Oneirotopia, a dream enactment workshop at Močvara Gallery in Zagreb. Elbe is co-founder of Mimesis Magazine, and fat vampire press. He sleeps in Berlin.

→ join here ←

16 – 19. October 2024, Brussels, RITCS School of Arts, Dept of Animation

Distant Bodies & Different Worlds
Worlding Workshop by Karin Verelst, Carina Erdmann, Sébastien Hendrickx and David Tann. In collaboration with Ash Eliza Smith

The three-day workshop will explore what it means as a maker and a player to step into the frame of the screen, to move between real, virtual, and symbolic 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, exploring the intuitive and spatial ‘world’ in which they are situated through observational exercises and the subjective mapping.

Through critical reflection of the relationship between people and their digital proxies participants learn to generate narrative content and interactive game elements that enable and reflect screen experiences and interaction on multiple levels.

Temporal Worlding - Remote Reality Game workshop

A hybrid workshop connecting on site and remote participants via video call to enact a character with two bodies: gamer and avatar. Within a specualtive framing players experiment with temporal navigation systems and narrative structures from games and attune their bodies to the cyclical and linear rhythms that condition it.

12 October 2024 Conference The transformative potential of the arts & the operationality of their temporality, Zuerich

1 July 2024 DIGRA conferene Playgrounds, Gudalajara

14 June 2024 Kollektiv Zirkusgasse, Wien

3. March 2024, 8:30-11:00 pm CET

The Opening is a guided session by Anna Nowicka. It is rooted in an ancient practice of working with dreams, further developed by her teachers: Catherine Shainberg and Bonnie Buckner. In the session, we will plunge into one recent night journey chosen from all the dreams brought to the meeting. Collectively, we will unravel a deeper meaning of the chosen dream and return it to the original dreamer to hear the resonance that our words bring.

Il/legal Fictions is a participatory and artistic event series @au JUS, that explores law as a socially constituent and speculative force through somatic practices, relational protocols, social prototyping, embodied simulations and discussions.

4th & 11th November @au JUS, Brussels
Join the Role Play workshops SENSES OF SECURITY by our current resident Susan Ploetz to explore together how the interpersonal and bodily sense of security can be transferred to social and legal conventions.

︎︎︎INFO & SIGN UP HERE

dreamXchange is starting its first semi-public program during the months of November 2023 to February 2024.

Four artists, researchers, healers, tricksters or mythical figures are invited to guide the participants through a 2-3 hour session loosely based on the structure of the regular dream sharing sessions and the speaker's own approach to social dreaming and (collective) dream work.

→ PROGRAM ←

→ join the dreamXchange ←

→ about the dreamXchange ←

5 November 2023, 7 - 10pm CET

Blind Torus by Bea Xu an introduction to dreamwork – its methods and cosmologies – from the experience of a trainee, transpersonal psychotherapist. Bea will be drawing on case studies from peer-to-peer clinical work throughout their final year on the CCPE diploma: involving elemental magic, symbol association, energy tracking and the embodiment of a 7-year-long saga of shadow work. After the talk, there will be an experimental group activity, where attendees are invited to constellate tori of frequencies by associating with congruent ‘emotional tones’ from our dreams.

Bea Xu is a Chinese-British world-builder, ritualist and psychic worker based in London. Using collaborative play, speculative fiction and therapeutic intervention they design and means-test integral, post-capitalist cosmologies with live participants and fellow LARPers. Bea's work can be seen as a narrative engagement with archetypal shadow – often foregrounding blood magic, decolonized time and non-binary logic with an EcoGothic focus.

29/30 September @a.pass
Welcome to the DreamDungeon, a role play game set in a collective dream build from the collected dreams of the players and attending public. The players build the dungeon through free association and enter it through improvised directing, enacting and discussing of scenes. On the 29/30 September the doors of the dungeon will be open to the public in the flexible function of spect/actors while the group of practiced players will move the action forward.

︎︎︎Train your mind in dream recall and submit your dream as a building block of the dungeon. Submission is anonymous.

OPEN CALL 4 new members!!!

Au JUS is a project space in St.Gilles/ Brussels. It is run as collective process and play. Au JUS researches and rehearses deviant forms of being (together)in temporary realities and sensuous simulations. It offers a training ground for embodied experience of social imaginaries and the speculative remodeling of infrastructures. Au JUS self-organizes through monthly gatherings, in which its members experiment with changing rules, scores and stories that define what is happening in the space. Au JUS is sustained by different kinds of members that contribute with varying degrees of money and time (to be discussed). Like the space itself your role can shift over time. Please, send back the character sheet before the last day of August and join us for our next gathering in which new members may sign a fictional (but legally binding) contract to become member of our ASBL 'au JUS' which is also a collective worlding device.

Dream Dungeon is a Role Play Game that lets you (re)enter and explore a collective dreamscape. Connecting and merging the different dream locations in a growing underground architecture, it provides a place for a fictional tale to unfold through free association. Players may choose a character that has appeared in any of the shared dreams to follow and find out more about their desires, fears, and questions. In the dream dungeon, the individual dreamer dissolves in a trip of transindividual memory and reflection.
︎︎︎Audio instructions for dream recall
︎︎︎Join the discord for future sessions

Emotional Futures is an extended reality game challenging you to extract and account for your emotional labor in the fictional currencies Blood, Sweat, and Tears, produced and valorized in interaction and relation to other players. Prompting you to evaluate and reflect on the conditioning of subjectivity and sociality through standardized models of emotion, it also may open potential pathways to change the game and move beyond its map...

︎︎︎MORE INFO
︎︎︎PLAY HERE
︎︎︎JOIN THE COMMUNITY

15-16 May 2023

Mystical Languages and Affective Literacies, a lecture and workshop by Áron Birtalan at a.pass, Brussels

February 15th until 18th, 2023

Presentation of Pre-formative Play at artscience conference ‘Systems At Play: A Self-Organising Symposium on Self-Organisation’ hosted by Center Leo Apostel for Transdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)

6st of November 2022

DreamXchange starting again with weekely sharing sessions online. Join any Sunday, 20:00 ~ 22:00 CET, on discord, audio-only.

29.08.2022

Exquisite Corpse published in Metropolis M #4
How the fictionalizing of the body and use of somatic techniques may turn the players body into a play ground, allowing them to explore alternate selves, and subvert existing narrations and projections it is subjected to.

29 August - 1 September 2022

Footnotes: Annotating the Future of Arts Education is a workshop, conference, and role-playing game unfurling in a speculative scenario set in 2045. It will take place from August 29 to September 1 at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and is organized by School of Commons and 0ct0p0s. Participants will assume a character to design and research future realities for arts education. No prior experience in role-playing is needed.

Online

Blend&Bleed - Online Symposium on Transreality & Pervasive Play The series of online workshops conjures synergies between the fields of performance, larp, game design and media theory. The common inquiry will be the phenomenon of 'bleed', wherein the boundaries between fiction and reality, the virtual and physical world dissolve. with Simon Asencio, Francis Patrick Brady, Reed Berkowitz, Omsk Social Club, Brody Condon, Nina Essendrop, Ashley Ferro-Murray, The Interactions, Dorota Gawęda & Egle Kulbokaite, Rilla Khaled, Nick Koppenhagen, Martina Leeker, Isabel Lewis, Vinicius Marquet, Susan Ploet , Rebecca Rouse, Ju Row-Farr, Hito Steyerl, Trakal, Rozan van Klaveren & McKenzie Wark.Curation: Carina Erdmann

︎︎︎ PROGRAM

︎︎︎ WATCH

14th of June at Haus der Statistik, Berlin

Workbuilding a Worldbuidling workshop and exhibition on who and what works.

12th of Februar 2022

Buried Accomplices is an online LARP that lets you reflect on your present through the lens of historic imaginaries of the future as well as speculative future visions onto the past.

Image: Deep fried meme template uploaded by an Imgflip user, Fonts by Floriane Rousselot

ABYSM Accomplices is a hybrid game that combines methodologies from Role Play and Computer Game Design, Therapy and Performance Improvisation set in a state of connected Hypnagogia.

Image: Dawid Grzesinski & Nikolas Brummer, UI: Marijn Degenaar, Font by Sophia Brinkgerd

Where the unborn conspire Worlding workshop for more than one voice* with School of Commons at Shedhalle Protozone 4 + online.
Image: Design by Marijn Degenaar

20th of November 2021
Distant Bodies and Accomplices an online game that uses the theatre as its map. Prototype presented at IMPACT FESTIVAL, Théâtre de Liège .