22 – 24 May 2026, Brussels

What is the Imaginary Institute?

In a sense, it is a game. An infinite game, or a meta-game, rather than a finite one. A game that makes games, with ambitions to provide people the collective imagination protocols to reconstruct the imaginary.

We ask: What would an Imaginary Institute be like? In multiple senses at once.

A place that does not exist in the usual sense — or at least, does not exist yet. A place that is imagined into existence anew each time it happens, by those who participate. A place whose aim, perhaps, is precisely to enable that which does not yet exist to come into being. A place that beckons to the futures, and uses play, collective imagination, and emergent complexity as its core operations. A place that seeks to shift the collective imaginary by seeding new protocols: scores, games, collective intelligence techniques, collaboration methods, ecologies, futurology and foresight methods, and so on.

We ask: What kinds of practices should happen in such a place? What protocols, lectures, classes, rituals, training techniques? We write them down as protocols. We try enacting them. We iterate them. And in this way, step by step, we play the Imaginary into the real.

Anyone can be in the Imaginary Institute. It can happen anywhere.

So, what protocols would you propose?

The Future Explorers Club

This time, the frame is the future. Foresight and futurology are protocols to make the present playable. Imagination is social, contested, shareable, made between us (Chiara Bottici).

We will be making a game together about the future, and imaginative agency.

The Future Explorers Club is a game in early development, from an Erasmus+ collaboration between Science of Singularities, Imaginary Institute, CLEA/VUB, and partners in Germany and Finland. Its subject is imaginative agency.

The game is not yet a finished thing. It is built from dynamic segments that can be recombined, questioned, transformed. We are not playing it so much as making it. Taking it apart and putting it back together. Gathering together an international, intergenerational community in the process.

Schedule

Friday and Saturday are organised around cycles of iteration: proposing protocols, testing them in parallel, brainstorming what comes out of them, breaking what does not work, going again. The work circles around questions like:

How can spaces of play and collective research become transformative communities, hybrid and intergenerational, moved by the desire to change?
How might play and pedagogy fit together? How do we create spaces to educate ourselves to imagine together, practicable by a fifteen-year-old, an educator, an artist, a researcher, an activist?
What does it take to build imaginative agency in a generation that has been told the future is closing?
What role should imagination play in the next year, five years, twenty? Where should we be pointing our collective imagination?

Thursday 21 May

The Imaginary Institute joins the Children's Rights Parade at Kinderrechtenwerf, Erasmushogeschool Brussel.

Friday 22 May · 11am – 6pm · Room LIC.4.09

LIC, Pleinlaan 2 · Go to the first floor, ask at reception for "Imaginary Institute — Playing with the Future".

11:00 Intro & Future Life Lines — start iteration

12:30 Crossing Life Lines, parallel iterations

Crossing Life Lines 1
Crossing Life Lines 2
Crossing Life Lines 3
Crossing Life Lines 4
Crossing Life Lines 5

13:30 Lunch @ Complex

14:30 Parallel iterations

Alterlibrary: Renewable Imaginaries
Images
Narrative
Stigmergy
Protocol open

16:30 Talk / panel discussion

19:00 Dinner & evening entertainments @ CLEA House

Saturday 23 May · 10am – 6pm · Room LIC.3.03

LIC, Pleinlaan 2 · Go to the first floor, ask at reception for "Imaginary Institute — Playing with the Future".

11:00 Intro — How could this go wrong?

11:30 Parallel iterations

Table 1 — Images & Words (a)
Table 2 — Images & Words (b)
Table 3 — (D)Rea(l)ms
Table 4 — Protocol open
Table 5 — Protocol open

13:30 Lunch (kebab outside)

14:30 The Game Game

15:30 Final iteration — TBD, collectively

19:00 Dinner & evening entertainments @ CLEA House, or in the city

Sunday 24 May · internal day @ CLEA House

11:00 Imaginary brunch

14:00 Imaginary planning

18:00 End. Dinner at CLEA House for those remaining.

Practical

Dates 22 – 24 May 2026

Venue Days at LIC Learning & Innovation Center ULB-VUB, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels 22 May · 11am – 6pm · Room LIC.4.09 23 May · 10am – 6pm · Room LIC.3.03 Evenings at CLEA House for dinner and entertainment

More info Imaginary User Manual · Imaginary Institute main page