Immersive Acts: Disrupting the Frame by Otherwise Narratives

Immersive Acts: Disrupting the Frame by Otherwise Narratives invites contributions that explore how immersive experiences and technologies can be leveraged to disrupt established modes of authorship and viewership, creating environments in which storytelling becomes a collective, non-linear, multi-sensory, and multi-perspective engagement. The symposium explores how immersive and transdisciplinary forms of narrative, performance, interaction and storytelling can enable diverse points of view, transcend epistemological, disciplinary, and geographical barriers, and support equitable and pluralistic practices.

We invite proposals for presentations, prototypes, demos, installations, performances, workshops, screenings and other relevant formats through three key themes:

1. More-Than-Human Realities
2. Sustainable and Justice-Led Immersive Responses to Crisis and Emergency
3. Immersive Innovation Design: Bodies, Sensors, and New Narratives

For more information on the three themes, please see the details below.

If you are interested in participating, please submit your proposal by completing this form.

The deadline for submissions is Monday 8 December, 12 noon GMT. Selected participants will be notified by the end of January 2026.

Any questions or queries, please contact [email protected].

Track 1: More-Than-Human Realities

This track explores how immersive technologies can be used to reframe our relationships with the complex and interdependent realities of living systems. By enabling participants to perceive and experience the world through multiple species’ perspectives, immersive media can unsettle anthropocentric assumptions, bringing human, microbial, plant and animal lifeworlds into shared sensory, spatial and narrative spaces. Through the integration of scientific data, sensory augmentation and speculative storytelling, these mediated environments can make visible and audible the subtle dynamics of ecological networks, foregrounding non-human agency, temporality and relationality, while opening space for queer ecologies and non-binary ways of sensing, knowing, and being.

We invite practitioners and researchers to share critical and creative approaches that explore how immersive experiences can act as platforms for more-than-human communication, empathy and ecological awareness. This includes projects that translate environmental processes into visual, sonic or haptic forms, create multiperspectival storyworlds where conflicting and overlapping viewpoints coexist or speculate on future ecologies that challenge extractive, colonial and human-centred paradigms. We welcome contributions that embrace interdisciplinary methods, combining environmental science, design, spatial practice, fine art, speculative fiction and technological innovation to imagine and enact alternative modes of living together.

We are seeking submissions that reflect on the role of immersive media in fostering environmental imagination, public dialogue and shared stewardship of multispecies futures. This includes practice-based, research-led and theoretical responses that examine the ethics, politics and possibilities of representing other species’ perspectives, and that experiment with new forms of collaboration, co-creation and dissemination.

Track 2: Sustainable and Justice-Led Immersive Responses to Crisis & Emergency

This track examines how practitioners and researchers working with immersive technologies are responding to the intersecting crises of climate change, environmental degradation, inequality, and human rights by redesigning and reimagining practices, digital tools, and narratives that prioritise civic agency, community co-creation, and challenge and resist the reliance on extractive systems.

As our understanding of the environmental costs of immersive technologies deepens, alongside the structural inequalities and power struggles that underpin the crises and systemic injustices of our times, there is an urgent need to reconceptualise immersive practices through the lenses of decarbonisation, decolonisation, and environmental and social justice. This reframing requires us to reposition immersive media as a contested space for struggle, enactment, embodiment and imagining of a fairer world and livable futures. This orientation demands the interweaving of diverse perspectives that propose new frames of reference, opening pathways beyond extractive models towards life-affirming approaches to immersive technologies.

We invite contributions that engage immersive technologies as tools for change and civic action that address crises and emergencies, including but not limited to climate-intensified natural disasters; extraction and sacrifice zones; the slow violence of environmental degradation; structural oppression; the legacies of colonialism and ongoing climate coloniality; and conflict, migration, and displacement. Contributions could include, but are not limited to, immersive digital reconstructions and rematerialisations through immersive experiences and gaming; spaces for rehearsal and future planning through digital twins; tools for public investigations, factual and fictional storytelling experiences, and forms of civic investigations, as well as place-based installations that engage public spaces and protest. We are particularly interested in approaches that embrace equitable co-creation with immersive media, do-it-with-others collaborative design and storytelling methods (DIWO), low-carbon and Indigenous technologies (Lo-TEK), and approaches grounded in LGBTQIA+ and Global Majority perspectives.

Track 3: Immersive Innovation Design: Bodies, Sensors, and New Narratives

This track investigates how immersive frameworks spanning Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality can be mobilised not only to design and explore virtual worlds but also to reimagine the future embodiments, applications, and socio-technical narratives of immersive technologies themselves. Immersive methods are increasingly entangled with processes of design engineering, enabling the creation of both digital environments and tangible products, while also opening speculative space to envision next-generation hardware, software, and hybrid systems.

We invite contributions that engage critically and creatively with immersive frameworks as tools for ideation, prototyping, and iterative development, whether in the form of early experimental projects, speculative mock-ups, or historical case studies of technologies that have evolved from modest prototypes to widely adopted innovations. This includes work that expands the field across diverse domains such as software and hardware design, hybrid product and fashion innovation, inclusive and accessible design, automotive futures, material science, medical technologies, biotechnology, and bioinformatics.

We are particularly interested in approaches that consider the needs, perspectives, and agency of a wide range of user groups, children, older adults, scientists, LGBTQ+ communities, and marginalised or underrepresented populations, foregrounding inclusive design principles as central to technological development. Contributions may explore how immersive technologies and frameworks can foster new ways of thinking, making, and collaborating across disciplines, and how they can catalyse equitable, imaginative, and socially responsive futures.