and the socio-political context of our world, “Pillow Brawl Tournament” offers its participants a soft outlet while engaging with care and respect. The brawl brings the humour of wrestling to a softer level, keeping the drama and adding the love.


 draws inspiration from arcade fighting games like Street Fighter and Tekken. Set up as a hybrid playformative environment, the audience can join, judge and support. The participating public can choose to be fighters or referees, taking on a different role in the game.


The referee observes the fight and activates the pillow controller to count the points, impacting the life bars. These are projected on the wall at the back of the ring. When one of the fighters' life bars reaches zero, the battle ends and a winner is declared. After several rounds (depending on the number of participants), the overall winner of the tournament receives the Pillow belt if they can defeat the final boss...

Pillow Brawl Tournament

, is an interactive sound workshop. Looking for the sounds and rumors of the middle age, this experiment is an invitation to imagine the gossip, the voices and the songs floating around the rooms of the museum.

Together we collected characters, imagine sounds and played with the sounds together, live as performers and recorded as an interactive visual.


At the beginning of the workshop, participants are guided through a vocal warm-up exercise.Then, they are briefly guided through different areas of the museum and divided into groups in front of various paintings.In these groups, they imagine the sound of a painting and act it out together.

Each participant takes a piece of paper and a pen.Then, they explore the rest of the museum on their own or in small groups.Once they find a character or object they would like to sonify, they draw it on the paper. Once they are satisfied with their selection, they cut it out and prepare to digitize the drawing and its corresponding sound.

During the break, one of the workshop instructors will record each participant's sound and scan their corresponding drawing.All of the recordings and drawings will be integrated into the game engine so that they canbe arranged as the final collage after the break.

While the samples and drawings are integrated into the game engine template, participants arrange and play with the analog collage. One of the workshop instructors acts as the chorus director, pointing to different drawings on the table.When an instructor points to a drawing, its creator produces the sound they associated with it.This creates a chaotic and playful chorus, bringing the collage to life.

The digital collage is exported for playback on a touchscreen device.Participants can play the audio samples they created by tapping the digital scans of the drawings.

The first edition of this workshop took place at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in the context of their exhibition 

Gossip Choir Collage

As part of our ongoing exploration on alternative digital spaces, we present Whisper Gardens, a collectively built digital space for asynchronous-anonimous communication. Whisper Gardens aim to be an intimate playable 3D enviroment, made by the 3D scans of objects of real life creating surreal dream-like spaces in which players can leave messages to be found by other players.

To create a Whisper Garden we invite a group of up to 12 people to record 360º videos of elements in the proximities. Those videos are then processed to create 3D assets that will form the digital space. Through a simple card game, we collectively decide on the size, position and number of objects. Afterwards, the game is exported and published online for participants and curious visitors.


A short introduction is given about platforms and internet communities that are currently exploring ways to be connected online as an alternative to what is offered by Big Tech platforms.

Participants explore the surroundings in pairs, looking for an object or area of interest to record a short video with their phones.They are also equipped with color flashlights to enhance and slightly alter the appearance of the scans.

Before the break, we ask each participant to select a video.Then, the video is processed into a 3D object and imported into the game engine.

Each participant receives a wooden block representing an object they scanned, as well as a set of action cards.Taking turns, they present their chosen object and place it on the printed map. At the same time, one of the workshop facilitators does the same in the game engine, thus creating an augmented digital twin. Once every element is placed on the map, participants use their action cards to clone, scale, or rotate an object of their choice. These actions are simultaneously translated to the game engine as well.

Once the digital world feels complete, participants are given a short walkthrough of the space, as well as a demo of the whisper mechanic. Participants will receive an email afterwards with a link to download the game.

. The resulted Whisper Garden can be played or downloaded 

Whisper Garden

 is an installation that tricks its users to invest time in a simple yet addictive game. Through this altar, players worship a living imagery that demands frustration, competition, and obsession. It will keep you wanting to start over, never leaving the machine. Shaman garage invites us to “play” at doomscrolling. Is it fun? Using classical game mechanics “difficulty levels, frustrations and rewards” LOOPSCROLL highlights how these are very close to the ones used on social media platforms and how they become addictive.

 wanted to reflect on the context we understand social media, the narratives it generates and the behaviors it forces on us. While the arcade reproduces the addictive mechanics of money driven social media, fooling the players in mini feedback loops; it is also presented as an object of worship, revealing the internet folklore as a treasure from the past, a complex and fascinating mythology. 

Shaman garage conducted an archival exercise, realizing that the memesphere needs careful hands to preserve its symbols, icons and narratives. “Memes privilege emotion and vitality over reason and accuracy; they reward the absurd and the exaggerated. This is precisely why we want to ‘rescue’ them, to preserve their value.”

This project is supported by Cross-Tic, Planetart and Sickhouse.

Loopscroll

 is a series of playful participatory experiments that use live-action role-playing (LARP; larp) as a method to explore what it means to dream collectively. 

The project was developed in collaboration with artist 

“Jana Romanova is a multidisciplinary artist working with games, performance, and photography. Through role-playing, social games, and various playful experiments, she researches liminal spaces, (in)visible systems that shape us, and what agency, care, and ecological imagination might look like when we playtest other ways of living together.”

 

We invited her to explore the liminal spaces of Enschede and imagine games there that could help us explore the concept of dream in all its interpretations. The result of this collaboration found its form in a publication with the rules of every game that emerged from the peculiarities of each space visited.

The first Dreamwalk explore role-playing as a form of collective lucid dreaming, where meaning doesn’t need to come first, but can emerge through play. Can a dream be shared? Is it the same dream?

A story about a group of childhood friends who used to play at an abandoned airfield, and who promised to meet there every year. They try to keep the promise for decades, until one day, they can’t make it anymore. This dreamwalk explore dreams as fantasies of the future. Will your dreams come true as you imagined?


What if there was nothing else left in the world but a parking lot? What kind of a new world would make sense around it? One that would explain its existence?
What if a group of demiurges is trying to fix a glitch in their world-building process. They erased everything they didn’t like, but the parking lot stayed. What rule do they need to change for it to disappear? And how to dream of a better world?


This larp explores the idea of infiltrating someone else’s dream. If we could do that and alter that person’s dreams, whose mind would we want to inhabit? Could we hack the dream of a dictator? Could we influence their decisions? How will seeing his dreams change us?

If you want to read more about each of the larps or want to download the assets to play them, you can find the files 

Projects

In-House Projects

Pillow Brawl Tournament

Gossip Choir Collage

Whisper Garden

Collaborations

Loopscroll

Dreamwalks