BIFF Exhibition: After Virtual Reality

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 physical and digital environments, embodied and computational experiences, and human-authored and generative processes. This exhibition highlights recent narrative artworks in virtual, augmented, and extended reality. 

This exhibition is curated by the Extending Digital Narrative project at the Center for Digital Narrative in association with the Bergen International Film Festival (external link). and USF Verftet.

Come visit us at: Visningsrommet USF Verft
Map: Google Maps (external link)

Free Admission

Some events require separate registration:

• XR Demo Days: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454481 (external link)
• Performances: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454469 (external link)
• Finding Frida: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454489 (external link)
   

Opening

October 15, 17.00.

Exhibition

October 16-21, 13.00-20.00
Visningsrommet USF Verft

Main Artworks

• The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo — Created by Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher and Roderick Coover
• Finding Frida — Created by Hilde K. Kjøs, Cecilie Levy and Bjørn-Morten Nerland
  • Separate registration is required for this project: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454489 (external link)
• Glasslike Fabric — Created by Jason Nelson
• The Land of Crystals — Created by Eamon O'Kane
• Bybanen Slop Surfer — Created by Colin Robinson
• Between Page and Screen — Created by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse
• The Fishbowl Leaks — Created by Jakob Kusnick
   

XDN [Work-in-Progress]

• Historically Yours — Created by Lina Ruth Harder
• YOUR UPDATE HAS FAILED — Created by Sérgio Galvão Roxo
• From Ingrid to Bergen — Created by Pedro Velho

XR Demo Days

Showcase of specific XR projects

Friday 16 Oct and Saturday 17 Oct.
Requires Sign-up: Here (https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454481) (external link)

• The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain — Created by: Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher and Roderick Coover
• The Grand Hotel Galactic Center — Created by: Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher and Roderick Coover
• Her Name Was Gisberta — Created by Sérgio Galvão Roxo
• Emperor — Created by Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen
• Goliath — Created by ANAGRAM
• Fiery Sparks of Light — Created by Caitlin Fisher

Guided Tour

Monday October 19, 16.00-17:00

Performances

Monday October 19, 17.00-18:30
Requires Sign-up: Here (https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454469) (external link)

• 17:15–18:00 — Judd Morrissey — Latent Laughing Medusa (Cinemateket USF)
  A live Zoom 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.
   

Full Descriptions

Main exhibition works

The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo

Created by Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher, and Roderick Coover

The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo is an immersive embodied installation. Based on perhaps the most absurd of Robert Coover’s Grand Hotel sketches, this hotel is a hotel of dreams, in which the hotel manager is a fortunetelling cockatoo. The audience enters a large installation in the form of a bird’s nest. Embedded in the walls of the nest are four large screens, where short fragments of dream narratives recombine. The authors wrote the dream narratives in an adapted exquisite-corpse fashion, using AI text-to-video generation as a prompt. Voice-over narration of selected narratives, tracked separately from the videos, narrates the stories. At the back of the nest, a curtained booth houses a video of the fortune-teller and an interactive fortune-telling device. Guests can press a button to generate a fortune of their own, which is printed for them to take home.

Finding Frida

Created by Hilde K. Kjøs (Director & Story Design), Cecilie Levy (Scriptwriter & Original Idea)and Bjørn-Morten Nerland (Producer)

In a “real unreality” VR space, a miniature Art Nouveau villa appears before expanding to full scale. Past and present weave together as we step into the world of Frida Hansen — once an internationally acclaimed textile artist, now largely forgotten. Guided by her great-great-granddaughter Cecilie, we explore a lush garden where archival photographs, a gramophone, and woven artworks become portals into Frida’s life. As bankruptcy and profound personal grief descend, the vibrant garden withers into darkness. Four enigmatic female figures emerge, foreshadowing the work Semper Vadentes and the beginning of Frida’s artistic awakening. Across a century, Frida and Cecilie’s lives intertwine. Through art, hardship is transformed into enduring beauty — a testament to how the role models we uncover continue to inspire and shape who we become.

• Separate registration is required for this project: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454489 (external link)

Glasslike Fabric

Created by Jason Nelson

Glasslike Fabric is an interactive narrative where the reader scans the world, anything,everywhere, and generates strange stories about things capture by their phone’s camera. The viewer points at a room, street, object or landscape and presses Scan. The work captures a still image, finds shapes within it and outlines selected regions. Red and grey lines, arrows, labels andfragments of equations connect the shapes.

The work uses OpenCV.js to detect edges and colour boundaries, identify contours and select prominent shapes. Tapping an outlined shape opens a short fictional incident report, assembled from prewritten phrases using a far too complex generative story engine. The shape’s type determines which opening phrases are available, while its size and complexity also affect thebrief stories.

These are generated stories of places where neighbouring dimensions overlapped, allowing materials and objects to intermingle and impact their respective worlds. Trajectories change direction, glass retains an image, a wall becomes fabric.

With a near infinite number of stories, the work builds new worlds with every new snapshot of what’s around you, ordinary surroundings become imagined incidents, diagrams measure the evidential rate.

The Land of Crystals

Created by Eamon O'Kane

The Land of Crystals creates a moving panorama from archival photographs and historical images of Edvard Munch’s demolished house and studios at Ekely in Oslo. Through the manipulation and sequencing of these still images, the film reconstructs a place that no longer exists, creating a virtual passage through Munch’s working environment and the landscape that surrounded it.

The film’s voice-over is drawn from Munch’s writings in The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, a portfolio of texts and images compiled at Ekely in 1915–16. Several of the archival photographs show Munch in his Winter Studio, creating a direct connection between the written voice heard in the film and the physical spaces in which these texts were conceived.

The Norwegian texts are spoken by an AI-generated voice. This introduces an intentional tension between historical memory and contemporary technology. Munch recorded his voice onto wax cylinders during his lifetime, but none of these recordings have survived, and there is no known surviving recording that allows us to hear what his voice sounded like. The voice in The Land of Crystals is therefore neither an attempt to reproduce Munch’s actual voice nor a historical reconstruction. Instead, it occupies the space between absence and imagination: a technologically generated voice giving sound to words whose author’s own voice has been irretrievably lost.

The title is taken from Munch’s writings, in which he refers to a “Land of Crystals.” For O’Kane, the phrase becomes both a poetic image and a conceptual framework for thinking about memory, geological time, transformation, and the archive. The film considers how technology can reactivate fragments of the past while simultaneously reminding us of what can never be recovered.

Bybanen Slop Surfer

Created by Colin Robinson

Bybanen Slop Surfer is a playable descent into AI slop: a version of Bergen flattened, exaggerated, and reassembled through the visual language of algorithmically generated culture. The work subjects a recognisable city to the same processes increasingly applied to images, writing, music, and online culture: simplification, repetition, imitation, and endless recombination. 

Bergen becomes simultaneously familiar and synthetic — a cheerful approximation of itself.

Between Page and Screen

Created by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse

An unlikely marriage of print and digital, Between Page and Screen chronicles a love affair between two characters, P and S. The book has no words, only inscrutable black-and-white geometric patterns that, when coupled with a webcam, conjure the written word. Reflected on screen, readers see themselves with an open book in hand as language springs alive and shape-shifts with each turn of the page. The story unfolds through a playful and cryptic exchange of letters as P and S struggle to define their relationship. Rich with innuendo, anagrams, and etymological and sonic affinities between words, Between Page and Screen revels in language and the act of reading.

The Fishbowl Leaks

Created by Jakob Kusnick

The Fishbowl Leaks transform(s) the exhibition into a porous virtual aquarium…
Visitors encounter fragments of the surrounding works as marine life and unstable species through a browser-based augmented reality layer. Each encounter alters a personal creature, shaped by the visitor’s movement through the exhibition, transforming it into a generative story.

The aquarium acts as both environment and metaphor. It displays containment but also resembles a collective, developing system. On a shared screen, the aquarium begins in a state of order: partitioned and classified. As visitors contribute their creatures, this order gradually breaks down. Texts detach, species break free, the tank falls apart, and memory is leaking, releasing the creatures into open waters…

The Fishbowl Leaks imagine(s) a living narrative ecosystem. The single artworks start in fixed 
categories and grow together into a symbiotic, participatory collective, by the help of exhibition 
visitors. The result sits between exhibition guide, generative story system, and shared 
hallucination in a container. What might evolve when that container starts to leak?

XDN [Work-in-Progress]

Historically Yours

Created by Lina Ruth Harder

Historically Yours is an interactive podcast broadcasting from the Underworld. This work in progress gives visitors a direct line to Cleo, Toinette, and Henri, three fictional hosts loosely inspired by Cleopatra, Queen Marie Antoinette, and astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

Visitors listen through headphones and send the hosts a question, a grievance, or whatever is keeping them awake. Artificial intelligence transforms each contribution into a new conversation, performed through three synthetic voices. A live transcript accompanies the discussion, while illuminated sculptural heads show who has the microphone.

The hosts are not digital reconstructions of historical people. They are deliberately unreliable approximations assembled from historical fragments, popular myths, and cultural stereotypes. Their appearances, on screen and as 3D-printed sculptures, reflect familiar visual clichés through which historical women are recognised. Their voices are equally speculative: we do not know what these women sounded like, yet synthetic speech gives each host the persuasive impression of an individual personality.

The work draws on the Dialogues of the Dead, a satirical tradition in which historical figures meet in the afterlife to gossip, argue, and judge the living. Here it becomes a feminist podcast in which women who have been celebrated, blamed, romanticised, or overlooked discuss the present from the Underworld. Part podcast, part séance, and part critique of synthetic authority, Historically Yours asks who gets to represent the past and why a convincing face and voice can be so easy to believe.

YOUR UPDATE HAS FAILED 

Created by Sérgio Galvão Roxo

YOUR UPDATE HAS FAILED is an interactive browser and WebXR experience tracing the digital evolution of SOGICE — sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts. These interventions seek to change or suppress LGBTQIA+ people’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression.

A computer anchors the narrative as three composite lives unfold across 1997, 2003, 2016, and 2026, each in a room shaped by its era. SOGICE’s forms evolve: printed questionnaires become software, then wellness platforms, moderation tools, and eventually AI-driven systems that classify and collect data. Blending documented practices with imagined scenes, the work reveals SOGICE not as a single event but as a digital ecosystem spanning “ex-gay” testimonies, promotional videos, exercises, prayers, and data systems. Language shifts toward care and progress, but the pressure to conform remains.

With each update, the system appears new; with each restart, it enters another era; and with every glitch, its limits are exposed. Visitors navigate through a headset, desktop, or phone, clicking, reading, and turning to explore the changing rooms. A dossier accompanies the work, linking sources with the narrative. SOGICE’s apparatus adapts and renews its promise of correction, but its failure endures: queer life persists.

From Ingrid to Bergen

Created by Pedro Velho

Technology is reshaping our relationships and communication with the dead, using the digital traces they leave behind. Decades before these technologies emerged, I was already doing something similar.

From Ingrid to Bergen is an interactive documentary about grief, memory, theatre, and the technologies we use to maintain relationships with what is no longer there. Moving across nineteen years, the project brings together personal archives, photographs, paintings, videos, and texts from different phases of an experience of loss. An idea of a grandmother, a promise, ghosts, forests, neurodivergence, theatre, and Ingrid Bergman form a shifting map through memory and reconstruction, tracing not only the loss of a person but also the loss of what I once imagined becoming.

Performances

19/10 - 17:15-18:30 
(requires sign-up: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454469 (external link))

Latent Laughing Medusa

Created by Judd Morrissey

“Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind.” — Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (in translation)

As machines increasingly generate our language, what remains irreducibly human—if not the body and its unspeakable excess? Latent Laughing Medusa is a live Zoom performance that explores what emerges when language is no longer supervised by a single voice, human or machine. Working at the intersection of generative AI, somatic writing, and collective participation, the piece asks how computational systems might be redirected away from totalization and toward multiplicity, breath, and embodied overflow.

The project takes inspiration from Hélène Cixous’ 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” written the year of the artist’s birth. While Cixous’ call was addressed explicitly to women writing from historically silenced bodies, this work approaches her text from a queer, gender-expansive position: not as inheritance, but as listening across time. If Cixous urged women to “write the body,” this performance asks what body-writing might look like in the age of large language models.

A composed text—part meditation on memory, signification, gender, and the experience of undergoing a ketamine therapy trial—serves as the performance’s initial spine. As the event unfolds, this text gradually unwrites and recomposes itself through the friction between vocal utterance, gesture, generative AI outputs, and live audience participation. Linear semantic language loosens into spatialized, sonic, and affective clusterings drawn from the shared field of performer, participants, and machine.

Participants will be invited into structured, often nonverbal interventions—breath, laughter, and murmured phonemes—creating a distributed chorus. These inputs will be processed in real time, feeding an evolving computational system that recombines language without stabilizing it into a single authoritative meaning. Through green-screen wearables and body-mapped visual projection, emerging text and image will be inscribed into and across the performer’s body, rendering visible a hybrid “latent space” of somatic and synthetic processes.

Framed as a poetic ritual, the performance moves between destabilization and release. It inhabits the risks of unsupervised systems, where coherence fractures and authority dissolves, while exploring whether that destabilization can open into collective and erotic forms of expression. The event concludes by returning to its opening text, now altered by the shared encounter, suggesting that unsupervised clustering may generate new proximities without resolving into certainty.

At a moment marked by the consolidation of algorithmic language, the regulation of gendered bodies, and the contraction of institutions, Latent Laughing Medusa proposes a temporary, many-voiced zone of embodied inscription, where language does not conclude but vibrates.

The It-ernal Now

Created by David Jhave Johnston

An augmented performance lecture with generative video: You looking at you, looking at you, looking at you, looking at you. It looking at it, looking at it, looking at it, looking at it. Time is recursion.

A performative lecture on AI consciousness, proposing tentative methods for relaxing into the virtuality of reality as it decomposes into ambiguity—and an exploration of how to play peacefully through an AI apocalypse.

When a human looks at an AI looking back, who or what is looking at whom or what? Or is there just embodied-looking and computer-looking?

What does it mean to be real? What does it mean to be you? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be us? What does it mean to be?

Reality may be Virtual Reality.

XR Demo Days

Showcase of specific XR projects

October 16-17 
(requires sign-up: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/xdn/2454481 (external link))

The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain

Created by: Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher and Roderick Coover

Additional development: Julian Pillis and Colin Robinson

The first of the Revisitations: The Grand Hotels of Joseph Cornell series, Sand Fountain is a collaborative AR project by media artists Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher and Scott Rettberg that extends one of the imaginary universes of Joseph Cornell's collage series, The Grand Hotels, and the late Robert Coover’s book The Grand Hotels of Joseph Cornell. It takes a kaleidoscopic approach to time, image, language and story through the creation of evocative and entangled narratives interweaving past texts and imagined actions. Three poetic narratives are individually written and collaboratively crafted. The images consist of both deeply personal ephemera and ai-generated images and the narration plays between the human voice and generated speech. The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain is a place of memory and loss. Haunted objects come to life through collaborative methods of exchanging fragments, building fleeting stories, then turning to AI platforms and AR to occupy new narrative environments.

The Grand Hotel Galactic Center

Created by: Scott Rettberg, Caitlin Fisher and Roderick Coover

VR development: Colin Robinson

The VR experience The Grand Hotel Galactic Center is perhaps the grandest of the grand hotels–at a glance–but after several days in the bubble you realize why the rooms come so cheap. The clouds are on an infinite loop. The stars are all flickering. Glitzy exteriors concealing broken-down infrastructure Like a boarding house that is maintained without care. The exotic floor show almost makes up for it. But you sense that it is the same every night, and the performers are just going through the motions. You wish you could see something beyond the banality, but it just isn’t there. You might have loved this when you were a child, but every ounce of your childhood is gone, sapped from you. This is the kind of palliative care you get with the basic insurance. It is a place of wonder and despair. Galactic Center explores text-to-VR environment and gaussian splat as components of a Unity development process. Trigger warning: includes a depiction of suicide. 

Her Name Was Gisberta

Created by Sérgio Galvão Roxo

Her Name Was Gisberta is a VR/2D documentary that portrays the life and death of Gisberta Salce, a Brazilian Trans woman murdered by 14 young men (12 - 16 years old) in the city of Porto (Portugal) in 2006. Uniting the knowledge provided by Virtual Reality Perspective-Taking Tasks, this project was created as a tool of education, social intervention and activism against transphobia.

Emperor

Created by Marion Burger and Ilan Cohen

Emperor, an interactive and narrative experience which invites us to travel inside the brain of a father, suffering from aphasia. Alongside his daughter, we journey into the father’s mental space – imagined as a hand-drawn, monochrome landscape – as she seeks to learn more about his inner self, now obscured by illness.

Goliath

Created by ANAGRAM

Through mind-bending animation, GOLIATH: PLAYING WITH REALITY explores the limits of reality and a true story of so-called ‘schizophrenia’ and the power of gaming communities. Echo (Tilda Swinton) guides you through the many realities of Goliath, a man who spent years isolated in psychiatric institutions but finds connection in multiplayer games. Combining heartfelt dialogue, mesmerising visuals and symbolic interactions, weave through multiple worlds to uncover Goliath’s poignant story.

Fiery Sparks of Light

Created by Caitlin Fisher

Fiery Sparks of Light is an AR experience that reimagines a collection of poems by four renowned Canadian women poets - Margaret Atwood, Nicole Brossard, Canisia Lubrin and Sarah Tolmie. It was launched as part of an exclusive hybrid (onsite/digital) programme in Germany that celebrates Canada as the Frankfurt Book Fair Guest of Honor 2021.

Using volumetric cinema technology as the foundation, Fiery Sparks of Light includes an accompanying printed book that contains QR codes that bring  Atwood, Brossard, Lubrin and Tolmie to life as holograms on a mobile device. This enabled Book Fair guests to experience these four poets reading their own original poems, which explore feminist perspectives of patriarchy, gendered objectification, stereotyping and oppression, while further augmented audiovisual after-effects enhance the viewer’s experience. This sensory exploration is designed to elicit an emotional response as users set the stage for these fiery written words to spark to life.