[Air-L] CFS | After Virtual Reality: Extending Immersive Narrative Symposium

[Sérgio Galvão Roxo]

Dear all,

I'm sharing the call for submissions for the "After Virtual Reality: Extending Immersive Narrative Symposium".

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.

Deadline for submissions: May 17, 2026
Abstracts of 500-1000 words, with short bio and keywords (excluding references)
Submission Link: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=21016960
For more information: sergio.roxo at uib.no

Applicants will be notified in June.
Up to 20 proposals for presentations will be accepted for the symposium following a review process.

Authors of selected presentations will be invited to submit their work to a peer-reviewed publication.

What are immersive narratives becoming?
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.
We invite contributions that examine immersive narratives as spatial, multimodal, and relational practices, with attention to how they produce affect, reflection, identification, participation, and belonging. The symposium welcomes diverse critical perspectives and explicitly encourages contributions grounded in decolonial, queer, feminist, cyborg, and posthuman epistemologies, as well as community-based, activist, and industry-facing practices.

Potential themes:
We invite theoretical and empirical contributions addressing immersive narrative across the following themes, including but not limited to:
      
      Immersive Narrative Practices & Aesthetics
          ◦ Case studies of immersive storytelling across VR, AR, MR, and spatial computing
          ◦ Spatial storytelling, narrative, environments, and multimodal embodied experience
          ◦ Theoretical frameworks emerging from creative and practice-based research in immersive narrative
      AI, Authorship, and Generative Systems
          ◦ Relationships between AI and XR; AI-driven environments and generative narrative
          ◦ Thresholds between authored and generative processes
          ◦ New epistemologies of narrative authorship in computational systems
      Politics, Epistemology, and Social Practice
          ◦ Decolonial, queer, feminist, and cyborg frameworks for immersive media
          ◦ Narratives of belonging, exclusion, memory, and futurity
          ◦ Community-driven, participatory, and activist immersive practices
          ◦ Immersion as affective, political, and epistemological condition

Contributions may also address thresholds between physical ↔ digital, embodied ↔ mediated, and spectator ↔ participant across any of the above themes.

Collaborative submissions between scholars and creators are particularly encouraged.

Submission Information:
Submission format: Academic Abstracts
Specifications:
      •     Length: 500 — 1000 words (excluding references)
      •     Author bio: 50 words
      •     Keywords: Up to 5
Deadline: 17 May 2026    Notification: June 2026
Submission link: https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=21016960
Contact person: [sergio.roxo at uib.no]

Organizing committee
Scott Rettberg, Maria Engberg, Pedro Queirós Pinto, Sérgio Galvão Roxo, Anna Nacher

Up to 20 presentations will be selected from submissions, with additional participants invited as discussants and respondents. Selection is based on thematic fit, scholarly contribution, and the need for intellectually diverse perspectives on immersive narrative.

Selected contributions will be invited for inclusion in a peer-reviewed publication.

The After Virtual Reality symposium will take place between October 19-21, in conjunction with an exhibition on display from October 14-22, in collaboration with the Bergen International Film Festival.
There will be no conference fee. Lunches and a conference dinner will be provided by the hosts.

Organizing Institution
The Center for Digital Narrative (CDN) is a Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence dedicated to the study of narrative across digital, visual, sonic, and computational media. The symposium is organized within the framework of Extending Digital Narrative (XDN), an interdisciplinary research group focused on immersive, conversational, and generative narratives.
For more information: https://www4.uib.no/en/research/research-centres/center-for-digital-narrative

Funding
This is supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centers of Excellence scheme (project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative) and its SAMKUL project scheme (project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative).

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