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[Commlist] CFS | After Virtual Reality: Extending Immersive Narrative Symposium
Fri May 08 13:13:01 GMT 2026
Call For Submissions
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 (UiB), Norway. 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 (BIFF).
Organizing committee
Scott Rettberg, Maria Engberg, Pedro Queirós Pinto, Sérgio Galvão Roxo,
Anna Nacher
*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 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
<https://skjemaker.app.uib.no/view.php?id=21016960>
Contact person: Sérgio Galvão Roxo [(sergio.roxo /at/ uib.no)]
More information:
https://www4.uib.no/en/research/research-centres/center-for-digital-narrative/featured/cfp-after-virtual-reality-extending-immersive-narrative-symposium
<https://www4.uib.no/en/research/research-centres/center-for-digital-narrative/featured/cfp-after-virtual-reality-extending-immersive-narrative-symposium>
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.
Authors of selected presentations will be invited to submit their work
to a peer-reviewed publication.
October 2026, Bergen, Norway
• 19 October – Exhibition Opening & Artist Panel
• 20-21 October – Academic Symposium
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
<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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