Reality at Play: Create, Experience & Play in the DocLab Playrooms
What happens when we stop taking reality at face value? What's it like when games and web documentaries turn into a shared experience—by playing together, on the big screen? With three playrooms, IDFA DocLab explores such themes in a playful and interactive way. From creating your own zine to an AI-powered encounter with your opposite self: experience new technologies and prototypes, meet the artists, and defy your own perception of reality.
DocLab Playroom: Connected Offline
Saturday, 15 November | 14:00 – 17:00 | Free walk-in
In this playroom, artists take to the stage to present and navigate their interactive works live in the Interactive Cinema. With plenty of free playtime and opportunities to meet the makers, this playroom offers new ways to experience documentary games and digital art together.
The afternoon kicks off with the live performance of Matt Romein’s new project MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery, in which a simple text-based game exposes how quickly human-computer interaction can spiral into coercion and absurdity. Followed by a walk-through of Maisha Wester’s Coded Black, an immersive first-person open world game where every object, voice, and fragment is drawn from real archives and research confronting the haunting transnational legacies of anti-Black racism. Together with Nathalie Lawhead, we explore a digital requiem for the internet, a playful yet piercing work tracing the shift from creative freedom to constrained exploitation. This serves as an anti-big tech manifesto that reminds us the internet is still ours to reclaim.
Then, in Unimaginable Red, Vitor Freire and Monique Grimord reimagine Amsterdam's red-light district in an imaginary, parallel universe with a surreal layer of fiction. Finally, Jan Rothuizen will recount his journey through Colombia, opening up his sketchbooks and reflecting on his personal observations of traveling through the country as a commissioned artist.
Unimaginable Red (left), Tracing Colombia (right)
DocLab Playroom: I Feel Zine
Monday, 17 November | 14:00 – 17:00 | Free walk-in
As the internet becomes increasingly commercialized, controlled, and streamlined, the question arises: what parts of this digital culture do we want to preserve, and what might be better left abandoned? This playroom invites everyone, young and old, to think, create, and join the conversation about what parts of the internet we want to carry with us into the future.
Bring your laptop (if possible) and create your own zine to celebrate the digital worlds, works, and memories you believe should be preserved for the future. From early interactive web documentaries and experimental immersive projects to personal anecdotes, favorite memes, and online discoveries that mean something to you. Take inspiration from artist Jeroen van Loon's Life Needs Internet (a growing archive of handwritten letters in which people from around the world describe how the internet shapes their daily lives), and meet artist Nathalie Lawhead who will offer digital tools that encourage us to take back control, to build our own software, make zines, and reclaim the quirky freedom of the early internet days.
Meanwhile, Avinash Changa from WeMakeVR will present new tools to address the challenges (and opportunities) of preserving and future-proofing immersive art.
DocLab Playroom: I Feel Zine is presented in collaboration with CIIIC.
Life Needs Internet 2010-2025 (left), individualism in the dead-internet age (right)
DocLab Playroom: Hacking Reality
Tuesday, 18 November | 14:00 – 17:00 | Free walk-in
What happens when we stop taking reality at face value? In this playroom, artists and audiences tinker with our human perception and the systems that shape how we see, feel, and navigate the world. From supermarket self-scanners to mirrors, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.
Bart van de Woestijne brings an early prototype of Parallel You, an immersive, AI-powered encounter in which we can meet our ‘opposite self.’ In a small booth, he invites audiences to test and question his evolving work. Meanwhile, Sjef van Beers will take groups of people on scavenger hunts inside a nearby supermarket: self-scanner in hand, the ordinary will reveal something unexpected. And Celine Daemen will talk about her latest installation, exploring the question: do we all see the same thing when we share the same space? Her mirrored cube and stereoscopic illusions invite participants to look twice: at the world and at themselves, asking whether reality is ever truly objective, or whether it’s something we co-create, moment by moment.
This playroom is open to all: a space to play, question, and reassemble the logic of everyday life. Step in, look closer, and see what happens when reality gets hacked.
DocLab Playroom: Hacking Reality is presented in collaboration with Onassis ONX.
Nothing to See Here by Celine Daemen
