Event agenda

Singing Chen: Reimagining Immersion

Singing Chen reflects on her journey from cinema to pioneering immersive media, exploring how XR reshapes storytelling, audience presence, and narrative form.

The Carbon Footprint of an Idea: collective discussion on combining digital creation and ecological concerns

This participatory workshop invites artists to reflect on the ecological implications of digital creation at the stage of conception rather than after production.

Challenging Patriarchy in the XR Business

This conversation model will delve into how XR can be a place where new futures are designed on inclusion, so trans-feminist marginalised voices can recognise themselves not as an exception, but as a force already shaping what comes next.

The Colonisation of Imagination: AI, Power, and Who Gets to Tell the Future

Tina Gharavi examines how emerging technologies risk reproducing long histories of cultural extraction and narrative dominance.

Better Than Real? Sex, Power, and Desire in XR

This conversation explores how XR transforms experiences of sexual presence, identity, and intimacy from the perspective of the user.

Adaptive Mutation: How Ideas Outgrow Their Mediums

This keynote explores creativity as a process of adaptation under pressure, drawing a parallel with biological evolution in extreme conditions. When environments become uninhabitable, organisms do not disappear.

Writing and prototyping: co-creating an overview of the best tools for artists

In XR, prototyping isn’t a step; it’s the starting point. In a medium with no fixed grammar or stable rules, every project becomes uncharted territory.

Digital Life : Connecting through virtuality

This session explores how people form real friendships and intimacy in Virtual Worlds, and how avatar customisation, social presence and shared spaces shape those bonds.

Art Beyond Reality

I want to tell you a story about desire: the desire to create.

Welcome Address by Universcience & NewImages

Sylvie Retailleau, President of Universcience & Michele Ziegler, Executive Director of NewImages are delighted to welcome you to NewImages Festival 2026.

Best Practices in XR Production: Secrets from Producers

This session invites experienced producers to open up their real workflows

Fragile Characters & Brutal Worlds: Designing Vulnerability in Immersive Spaces

Alan Kwan's experimental video games, in contrast, ask a different question: What if the player feels powerless? In his work, protagonists are fragile, and players have limited control over their fate.

Connecting the XR French ecosystem with the world

In this panel CNC, Institut Français and Unifrance discuss their mobility opportunities for creators, mapping funding, residencies and coproduction routes linking talent, projects and markets between France and the rest of the world.

Brain Stretching: a workshop on surviving constant rewrites

In the field of immersive art, technologies and funders’ expectations are constantly evolving, leading artists and their projects to be constantly rewritten.

Building Business Plans for Immersive Projects

A practical session on budgets, cashflow and revenue models tailored to creative XR projects. Learn how to speak the language of investors and funds while protecting your creative vision

XR Ecosystem: Long-term Preservation & Distribution of Immersive Works

As devices, engines and platforms disappear, how can museums, festivals and creators keep today’s XR experiences alive for tomorrow’s audiences? This session looks at practical strategies for preserving immersive works.

Designing LBE Stories for Mass Audiences

This session explores LBE as XR’s mass‑consumption format, where hundreds of people cycle through the same experience every day and “immersion” has to work at a bigger scale.

Exploring Latin America’s XR Ecosystem

Industry professionals from across Latin America unfold how Latin Ameica XR has been powerful in the last decade, discussing gaming, education, culture and industry. The session highlights the best practices in their continent.

Watching for the Barbarians

In an endless desert, a female soldier waits for the Tatar barbarians, unseen for centuries. In a lucid dream, she finally meets them—and finds not the enemy of legend, but an unexpected other.

Meeting the Public: a collaborative workshop to design creators' ideal exhibition

A playful workshop to imagine and design your ideal XR ecosystem: from ideation to exhibition, inspired by The Exquisite Corpse game

Immersive Mapping and Spatial Narrative

This session explores how large‑scale projection and media facades can move beyond decorative visuals to become narrative architectures, where buildings and public spaces carry stories and points of view.

Strategies for Producing Multi-Platform Narratives

This session looks at how creators can design a storyworld first, then translate it into different versions for web, headsets, installations and social media without diluting narrative impact.

Imag(en)ing the interior body

A history of medical imaging in art and visual culture, and its impact on how we perceive our bodies. Drawing on cultural studies, science and health, this research explores how such images reshape care relationships and contemporary bodily imaginaries.

Catching breath: (not so) medical images of the lungs

The lungs are the only organ we can readily control, so their medical images might foster self-recognition. Yet representations—from a pin-up X-ray to a thoracic MRI sequence—can trigger very different experiences.

Tout passe: medical imaging, self-image

Art and science draw on fundamental human capacities embedded in discovery. Through the art-science project Tout Passe, we explore how shared surprises, for participants and audiences alike, can foster a rich, lasting scientific and artistic culture.

Domes the New Theatres for Collective XR Experiences

The planetary cinema is experiencing a revival: artists, distributors and venue managers discuss full-dome storytelling formats and how to plan content for the audiences and create engaging collective dome experiences.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Creative Europe (But Were Afraid to Ask)

An informative and structured workshop delivered by representatives of the Creative Europe Desks, offering clear and practical guidance on Creative Europe.

3D real-time digital cuisine

A few 3D real-time engines are available to create digital immersive and interactive installations. We will go through hardware tools and software recipes to qualify meals that creators can make out of them.

Introduction to Laser Cutting

Exploring Korea: New Korean Voices in Immersive Art

The session will highlight a new sensibility and bold approaches by Korean creators who are shaping the direction of immersive media in Korea.

Relations Without Filters

This workshop—drawing on couple therapy—collectively identifies the stakes of the artist–producer relationship and co‑constructs practical guidelines for a healthy, work-centred collaboration.

From Research to Practice in Digital and Immersive Arts

This keynote showcases Paris 8 ATI students’ and doctoral projects, exploring research in digital and immersive arts. It highlights how research experimentation enriches the artistic practice.

Agency, Emergence, & Shared Storytelling

Creator of The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue, Jason Moore unpacks how he blends live actors, audience agency and virtual sets to turn viewers into protagonists.

Judging the Machine: Curating AI Art Between Authorship and Ethics

A panel of XR professionals who unpack how exhibitions are redefining value, authorship and originality in the age of AI‑generated artworks.

Non-linear Narratives and VR Immersion

W.I.L.D. (Wake-Initiated Lucid Dream) explores entering a lucid dream from wakefulness, inviting you to visit a childhood friend trapped in memories, a world you can explore and shape.

ELEKTRA Virtual Museum - Showcase

EVM reimagines the museum for the 21st century as a large-scale collective VR experience. Turning the VR into a location-based technology, the EVM features artworks commissioned specifically for this space and works that have been digitized.

Ecological XR: Toward Zero-Impact Experiences

This session asks whether XR and AI can ever be “green”, and looks at concrete methods to shrink footprints across the whole lifecycle of a project.

Storyboarding in 360°

Mohammadreza Mazarei shares practical tools for managing viewer attention, building spatial dramaturgy and staging action in 360°.

Embodied Identities: How We Become in XR Spaces

Idealised, stylised, or non-human avatars fundamentally alter how we perceive others and ourselves. This panel examines embodiment and identity in social XR, and how avatar choice can shape self-presentation.

Methodologies Exchange: sharing approaches to creative methods for immersive experiences

Built around a card-based approach designed to explore the fundamentals of immersive creation, this workshop fosters a collective exchange on creative methods.

Gaussian Splatting, Explained

A beginner‑friendly, hands‑on workshop that shows how to turn simple photo or video captures into dense 3D “splat” clouds and navigable worlds using 3D Gaussian Splatting.

Onboarding / Offboarding the Transitional Space

A specialist conversation on how museums design the moments before and after XR experiences. From pre-briefing strategies, consent and expectation-setting, to decompression, reintegration, and narrative closure.

Trained to Oppress: When AI Learns Power Too Well

Can AI-driven artworks escape the biases embedded in their training data, or does it inevitably reproduce racism, sexism, and colonial paradigms? This panel confronts how AI characters can perpetuate or challenge discrimination.

3D real-time programming with AAASeed

AAASeed is one of the few opensource 3D real-time engines are available to create digital immersive and interactive installations. We will go through the possibilities AAASeed offers.

Use Cases: Reimagining Archives Through Immersive Experience

What if audiences didn’t just observe history, but actively reassembled it? This panel brings together creators and producers exploring how XR, AI, and spatial storytelling can transform archives into living, participatory systems.

XR Stories beyond Film and Games

This session unpacks how immersive stories change framing, pacing and viewer agency compared to flat cinema and interactive games, from continuous takes to gaze‑driven staging.

The Reprogrammed Stage XR Performances

This session looks at how XR and other immersive technologies are turning theatres and public spaces into programmable stages where audience movement, voices and bodies can drive the performance itself.

Adapting Across Formats: How to Rethink Artworks

This session dives into what changes, and what stays, for a story to survive the jump from page, canvas or personal memory into an XR world. Creators and producers will discuss concrete adaptation strategies: breaking the rules of linear narration.

Becoming Lucien

This keynote explores Becoming Lucien, an XR work-in-progress and NewImages XR Market award winner. The team shares insights into creating an intimate VR documentary on transition, dysphoria, and the search for a new voice through immersive storytelling.

Decolonizing XR and the Politics of Virtual

XR professionals, artists and activists will discuss collaborative methods to build ethical immersive stories that can authentically foreground underrepresented perspectives and imagine new futures.

The incredible journey of The Abyss Castaway

Join the chaotic shoot of The Castaway of the Abyss, where a hybrid set, special effects, fantastical creatures, and titanic battles turn the epic adventure into an interactive experience for the volunteer crew.

Closing Ceremony

Jeu ou réalité : que sont vraiment les mondes virtuels ? Une expérience immersive pour comprendre les mondes virtuels

L'immersif au prisme de l'IA

Réespiration: physiological abstraction, visualisation and concretisation of breathing

Formations dans l'immersif

This discussion brings together schools and universities in immersive creation, at the intersection of research and artistic practice. It offers an accessible overview of programs, student projects, and key challenges in the field.

Workshop The incredible journey of The Abyss Castaway

Join the The Castaway of the Abyss workshop on the hybrid set: test the immersive experience, explore the creative process, and discuss dramaturgical choices, mediation, and what makes the adventure work.