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 & Performances
- 20-21 October – Academic Symposium
The After Virtual Reality symposium will take place in conjunction with an exhibition on display from October 15-21, 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.
Programme
Monday 19 October — Exhibition tour and performances
Event time: 16:00–18:30
Venues: Visningsrommet and Cinemateket USF Verft
Georgernes Verft 12,
5011 Bergen
Map: Google Maps (external link)
- 16:00–17:00 — Guided exhibition visit (Visningsrommet USF)
- 17:10–18:00 — Judd Morrissey — Latent Laughing Medusa (Cinemateket USF)
A live performance using generative AI, somatic writing, and audience participation. Breath, laughter, gesture, and machine-generated language unsettle a single speaking authority and open space for multiplicity and embodied expression.
- 18:00–18:30 — David Jhave Johnston — The It-ernal Now (Cinemateket USF)
An augmented performance lecture with generative video, exploring AI consciousness, recursive looking, and the unstable boundary between virtuality and reality.
Tuesday 20 October — Academic symposium
Venue: SV old canteen, Room 4.41,
Christies gate 18
Time: 10:00–15:45
Map: Mazemap (external link) · Room information: Room 4.41 (external link)
10:00–10:10 — Welcome — Scott Rettberg
- 10:10–11:10 — Keynote: “Beyond the ‘God Trick’: Multisensory Storytelling and Documentary Epistemology”
Mandy Rose and Tom Livingstone
Drawing on four years of research into multisensory storytelling, Mandy Rose and Tom Livingstone ask how non-fiction media might move beyond the visual “view from nowhere” that Donna Haraway calls the God Trick. Through case studies including Hunger in LA, work by Marshmallow Laser Feast, and a multisensory biography of Judith Scott, they examine how touch, sound, scale, bodily orientation, and other sensory registers shape documentary knowledge. The keynote considers how these forms can make knowledge situated and relational, including through sensory perspectives often excluded from audiovisual media, and how they may shift documentary away from claims to a single, universal view.
Moderator: To be announced
11:10–11:30 — Coffee break
- 11:30–12:30 — Panel 1: Memory, witnessing, and historical encounter
Sohail Dahdal; Serge Bouchardon; Lina Ruth Harder
Across three diverse implementations, this panel asks how immersive media can bring audiences into contact with difficult histories without suggesting that the past can be relived or fully recovered. In LIFTA XR, Sohail Dahdal explores how traces of life in the abandoned Palestinian village surface when a visitor becomes still, making movement and attention part of the encounter. Serge Bouchardon’s ITS-STORY project at the Compiègne memorial uses mixed reality, archival material, and the site itself to support historical empathy while avoiding identification or historical illusion. In Historically Yours, Lina Ruth Harder uses synthetic voices of Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt to rework the “dialogues of the dead” and examines AI-generated voices of historical figures and the risks of computational ventriloquism.
Moderator: To be announced
12:30–13:30 — Lunch
- 13:30–14:45 — Panel 2: Bodies, sensation, and material worlds
Agnieszka Przybyszewska; Monika Górska-Olesińska; Natalia Fedorova; Uwe Brunner, Bettina Katja Lange, and Steve Nest
How do bodies and sensory environments shape what immersive narratives allow us to experience and understand? This panel approaches that question through haptics, illness, perception, intimacy, and trust. Agnieszka Przybyszewska reads Turbulence: Jamais Vu to ask when tactile and haptic elements are optional effects and when they carry meaning that cannot simply be transferred to another format. Monika Górska-Olesińska develops the idea of “immersive cancerography” through The Waiting Room VR and Mammary Mountain, examining how spatial and haptic form can enact illness narratives beyond written autobiography. Natalia Fedorova treats VR as a sensorium: a designed attentional space that can model reality and bring otherwise distant or overlooked aspects of physical and cultural worlds into focus. Drawing on interviews and XR workshops, Uwe Brunner, Bettina Katja Lange, and Steve Nest examine how spatial dramaturgy and sensory cues shape intimacy and trust in mediated environments.
Moderator: To be announced
14:45–15:00 — Coffee break
- 15:00–16:00 — Panel 3: Generative AI, authorship, and human–agent relations
Hon Bor So; Joakim Vindenes; Sérgio Galvão Roxo
Rather than asking only whether AI can contribute to a story, these papers examine how human judgement and machine-generated possibilities meet in immersive narrative. Hon Bor So introduces “boundary events”—decisions at which one possible narrative becomes the version that persists—and asks how the alternatives, uncertainty, and human judgement behind that choice could remain visible. Joakim Vindenes uses student VR productions to describe how narrative experience is co-shaped by users, environments, interfaces, and AI personae. Through YOUR UPDATE HAS FAILED, Sérgio Galvão Roxo traces how AI can assist creative production while its generative capacities intersect with the evolving rhetoric and digital infrastructure of conversion practices.
Moderator: To be announced
Tuesday 20 October — Evening reception and interactive demonstrations
Venue: Center For Digital Narrative,
Langes gate 1—3
Time: 17:30–20:00
17:30–17:40 — Welcome
- 17:40–18:10 — Artistic-display introductions
Contributors introduce their works, followed by time to roam among the pieces and speak with the artists.
Symposium artistic displays
- Immersive Shipwrecks
Contributor(s): Celia Quico
This 360° film connects the 1786 wreck of the San Pedro de Alcántara, which carried political prisoners from the Túpac Amaru II rebellion, with a speculative future shipwreck caused by rising sea levels. Set around Peniche, the work links maritime history with ocean literacy and climate futures.
- Eyes of Freedom Immersive
Contributor(s): Pat Clark
Using photogrammetry and 3D modelling, Eyes of Freedom Immersive recreates a travelling veterans’ memorial at life scale. The VR work considers how digital reconstruction can extend access to remembrance while keeping visitors connected to the physical memorial and its history.
- I FEEL YOU
Contributor(s): Uwe Brunner, Bettina Katja Lange, and Steve Nest
In this sensorial XR workshop, participants examined how intimacy and trust develop in mediated environments. The experience incorporated a scanned room, memory objects, haptic tools, and sensory elements like scent and food to create a shared sense of presence.
- VirtualPrimitiveHut
Contributor(s): Anna Tolkacheva and Steve Nest
This free-roaming VR work pairs a physical stage with a virtual hotel room and winter forest. Visitors wander and listen to fragments of conversation and field recordings, assembling their own soundscape from memories and traces of other people’s journeys.
18:10–20:00 — Open demonstrations and roaming
Time to try or view the pieces, talk with artists, and enjoy tapas and drinks.
Wednesday 21 October — Academic symposium
Venue: SV old canteen, Room 4.41, Christies gate 18
Time: 10:00–15:45
Map: Mazemap (external link) · Room information: Room 4.41 (external link)
10:00–10:10 — Welcome back
- 10:10–11:15 — Panel 4: Archives, heritage, and public futures
Vinícius Carvalho Pereira; Amanda Licastro and Liz Hogrefe; Freyja van den Boom
How can immersive media preserve threatened histories while making them available beyond conventional institutions—and help publics debate futures before they are built? Vinícius Carvalho Pereira examines three digital literature archives from the Global South, showing how interface and navigation can create immersion without high-end XR equipment. Amanda Licastro and Liz Hogrefe develop an XR archive of decolonial, queer, and feminist peace and protest histories, connecting physical collection objects with 3D digitisation, augmented reality, and a virtual exhibition. Freyja van den Boom’s Augmented Desires proposes speculative AR walks that bring smart-city policy into public space, so participants can consider how regulatory choices might shape everyday life.
Moderator: To be announced
11:15–11:30 — Coffee break
- 11:30–12:20 — Panel 5: Technologies, histories, and immersive ecosystems
Pedro Queirós Pinto and Sérgio Galvão Roxo; Jaércio da Silva and Cécile Méadel
This session connects the roles audiences take in immersive stories with the industries and infrastructures that shape those experiences. Pedro Queirós Pinto and Sérgio Galvão Roxo propose three orientations: storylistening, where audiences interpret a structured narrative; storysensing, where movement and attention help them find meaning in an open environment; and storyshaping, where their presence or choices help determine what the narrative becomes. Jaércio da Silva and Cécile Méadel examine cultural and creative industries as “laboratories” where narrative, spatial, and interaction practices are tested and later circulate into sectors such as engineering, architecture, training, and design. Their study draws on an exhibitor survey, interviews, and location-based XR examples.
Moderator: To be announced
- 12:20–13:20 — Keynote: In the Shadows of Revolutions
Roderick Coover
How have successive media technologies changed what artists can imagine doing with narrative? Roderick Coover follows a path from HyperCard, Storyspace, and early nonlinear editing through HTML, QuickTime VR, streaming and mobile media, game engines, XR, and contemporary AI. He argues that VR is one moment in a longer history in which stories have moved from fixed sequences to navigable structures, responsive environments, and generative systems. Drawing on montage, interactivity, immersive installation, and locative media, the talk considers how platforms can reveal or constrain narrative and sensory possibilities—and how AI changes creative practice by generating and extending media as well as rearranging it. Coover connects this history to his own work and to The Grand Hotels of Joseph Cornell.
Moderator: To be announced
13:20–14:20 — Lunch
- 14:20–15:10 — Panel 6: Immersive narrative futures
Scott Rettberg; Caitlin Fisher
These papers put experimental digital storytelling in conversation with the commercial experience economy and generative AI. Scott Rettberg turns to XDN’s Visitations: The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), where three works adapt literary and visual sources into AR, VR, and installation. The project tests generative image, voice, and environment tools while keeping human-written stories at its centre. Caitlin Fisher argues that commercial immersive experiences and experimental electronic literature have developed in parallel: the experience economy has pursued scale and shared embodied encounters, while experimental traditions have long examined agency, authorship, and narrative form. She asks what each can learn from the other’s blind spots.
Moderator: To be announced
15:10–15:25 — Coffee break
- 15:25–16:55 — “Introduction to the Special Issue and What Comes After Virtual Reality?”
Beginning with the question "What Comes After Virtual Reality?" in this symposium-wide discussion, we will broaden the scope to include questions and feedback collected during the event. The session will also provide information about the special issue.
Moderator: To be announced
16:55–17:00 — Closing
Wednesday 21 October — Conference dinner
Venue: Soya Restaurant (external link)
Time: 18:30