After Virtual Reality: Extending Immersive Narrative Symposium
October 2026: What are immersive narratives becoming?
A three-day symposium for a small cohort of participants, convened by the Extending Digital Narrative (XDN) research project the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence at the University of Bergen. An affiliated exhibition will take place during the gathering at the Bergen International Film Festival (BIFF).
October 2026, Bergen, Norway
- 19 October – Exhibition Opening & Artist Panel
- 20-21 October – Academic Symposium
The After Virtual Reality symposium will take place in conjunction with an exhibition on display from October 14-22, in collaboration with the Bergen International Film Festival.
As contemporary forms of digital narrative continue to expand, mutate, and hybridize, immersive storytelling has become a key site of experimentation across artistic, cultural, and technological domains. Immersive narratives now transcend singular media forms, platforms, or devices, unfolding across thresholds such as physical and digital environments, embodied and computational experiences, and authored and generative processes.
Immersive storytelling has often been associated with immersive media and Extended Reality (XR), encompassing Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). However, XR itself remains an unstable and evolving category. Drawing from Milgram and Kishino’s (1994) reality–virtuality continuum, we consider “XR” an open and extensible framework for emerging, speculative, and as-yet-unsettled forms of computationally mediated reality, including spatial computing, AI-driven environments, and hybrid physical–digital spaces.
After Virtual Reality: Extending Immersive Narrative brings together researchers, practitioners, and theorists to explore how immersive narratives are being reconfigured today — and what they might become. The symposium is organized by the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) at the University of Bergen, within the Extending Digital Narrative (XDN) research project, which takes an experimental approach to studying emerging forms of digital narrative and exploring the potentialities of emerging technologies for new genres of storytelling.
The symposium will foreground immersive narratives as sites of epistemological, aesthetic, and political experimentation.