Event agenda
Tuesday, 7 April 2026
10:00 - 11:00
11:00 - 12:00
Challenging Patriarchy in the XR Business
- Gender & Decolonisation
- Ethical Storytelling
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.
11:00 - 12:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
11:30 - 13:00
XR Market Day 1.2.
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
12:00 - 12:30
12:30 - 13:00
14:00 - 15:00
Sexual Realities: The Pov of Desire in XR
- Living the Virtual
This conversation explores how XR transforms sexual presence and desire through the POV of the user in Immersive technologies. Artists and curators will discuss experimentation with identity, fantasy, and new forms of intimate connection.
14:00 - 15:30
XR Market Day 1.3.
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette PM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
15:00 - 15:30
15:00 - 16:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
15:30 - 16:30
Digital Life : Connecting through virtuality
- Living the Virtual
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.
15:30 - 17:00
XR Market Day 1.4.
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette PM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
16:30 - 17:30
18:00 - 18:30
Wednesday, 8 April 2026
10:00 - 11:00
Collective Rituals in Immersive Spaces
- Living the Virtual
- Immersive Performance
This workshop guides participants through the practical design of sacred experiences in XR. Participants will experiment with the core elements of ritual design, light, sound, and repetition, and learn methods for creating sacred experiences.
10:00 - 11:00
Sustainable XR Distribution in Europe
- Immersive Distribution
This session asks a simple question with a hard answer: once an XR work premieres, where does it go next, and how do you keep it travelling without burning out teams and budgets?
10:00 - 11:30
XR Market Day 2.1
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
11:00 - 12:00
Connecting the XR French ecosystem with the world
- Immersive Production
- Immersive Distribution
- Immersive Funding
- Immersive Programming
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.
11:00 - 12:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
11:30 - 13:00
XR Market Day 2.2
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
12:00 - 13:00
Building Business Plans for Immersive Projects
- Immersive Production
- Immersive Funding
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
Long-term Preservation of Immersive Works
- Immersive Archives
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.
14:00 - 15:00
Designing LBE Stories for Mass Audiences
- Immersive Programming
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.
14:00 - 15:30
XR Market Day 2.3
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
15:00 - 16:00
Exploring Latin America’s XR Ecosystem
- Immersive Programming
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.
15:00 - 16:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
15:30 - 17:00
XR Market Day 2.4
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
16:00 - 17:00
Immersive Mapping and Spatial Narrative
- Immersive Production
- Beyond the Screen
This session explores how large‑scale projection and media façades can move beyond decorative visuals to become narrative architectures, where buildings and public spaces carry stories and points of view.
16:00 - 17:00
Strategies for Producing Multi-Platform Narratives
- Immersive Production
- Immersive Distribution
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.
Thursday, 9 April 2026
10:00 - 11:00
Domes the New Theatres for Collective XR Experiences
- Immersive Programming
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.
10:00 - 11:00
Sound in XR projects
- Immersive Production
- Immersive Sound
This session focuses on how soundscapes, music and spatial audio quietly do half the storytelling work in XR, guiding attention, shaping atmosphere and persuading the body to believe the world before the eyes has weight, distance, and breath.
10:00 - 11:30
XR Market Day 3.1
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
11:00 - 12:00
Exploring Korea New Korean Voices in XR
- Spotlight on Artists
Seven Korean artists supported by Arts Korea Lab and partner institutions present in‑development projects at the crossroads of XR, performance and art‑tech, from meditative mixed‑reality worlds to participatory installations.
11:00 - 12:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
11:30 - 13:00
XR Market Day 3.2
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
12:00 - 13:00
Judging the Machine: Curating AI Art Between Authorship and Ethics
- Ethical Storytelling
- Immersive Programming
A panel of curators who unpack how exhibitions are redefining value, authorship and originality in the age of AI‑generated artworks.
12:00 - 13:00
Live, Cinematic Directing Toolkit
- Immersive Performance
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.
14:00 - 15:00
Jaguar Worlds: Myth, Territory and Cultural Echoes
- Beyond the Screen
This global panel brings together artists and thinkers who work with jaguar myths and other big‑cat cosmologies from Latin America, Asia and beyond, looking at how similar figures and motifs appear across territories without collapsing their differences.
14:00 - 15:00
Storyboarding in 360°
- Beyond the Screen
Artists share practical tools for managing viewer attention, building spatial dramaturgy and staging action in 360°. They will explain their storyboard techniques and reveal how storytellers are learning to think in 360°.
14:00 - 15:30
XR Market Day 3.3
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
15:00 - 16:00
Embodied Identities: How We Become in XR Spaces
- Living the Virtual
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.
15:00 - 16:30
Artist with Artists - Speed Dating Session
- Spotlight on Artists
This informal conversation circle brings XR artists together to talk about their actual lives and practices behind the headset: how they develop their work, find collaborators and navigate funding, festivals and clients.
15:30 - 17:00
XR Market Day 3.4
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
16:00 - 17:00
Gaussian Splatting, Explained
- Immersive Production
- Gaussian Splatting
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.
16:00 - 17:00
Onboarding / Offboarding the Transitional Space
- Immersive Programming
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.
Friday, 10 April 2026
10:00 - 11:00
Trained to Oppress: When AI Learns Power Too Well
- Ethical Storytelling
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.
10:00 - 13:00
Think Tank Connecting Europe’s XR Funding Landscape
- Immersive Funding
A closed‑door think tank where regional funds and European stakeholders compare strategies, share expertise and best practices with the scope of finding common eligibility criteria for Europe’s XR support schemes.
10:00 - 11:30
XR Market Day 4.1.
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
11:00 - 12:00
Ecological XR: Toward Zero-Impact Experiences
- Immersive Production
- Immersive Distribution
- Ethical Storytelling
This session asks whether XR and AI can ever be “green” once you factor in devices, networks and servers, and looks at concrete methods to shrink footprints across the whole lifecycle of a project.
11:30 - 13:00
XR Market Day 4.2.
- Centre des Congrès de la Villette AM
Meeting duration:30 minute time slots
12:00 - 13:00
XR Stories beyond Film and Games
- Beyond the Screen
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.
14:00 - 15:00
Creating After the Prompt: Toward a Post-Generative Aesthetic
- Spotlight on Artists
- Beyond the Screen
This session asks what it really means to “author” an immersive work when environments, characters and sounds can be sketched from prompts, and how generative tools are reshaping ideas of style, originality and artistic responsibility.
14:00 - 15:00
The Reprogrammed Stage XR Performances
- Immersive Performance
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.
15:00 - 16:00
Adapting Across Formats: How to Rethink Artworks
- Immersive Production
- Beyond the Screen
- Immersive Distribution
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.
Best Practices in XR Production: Secrets from Three Producers
- Immersive Production
This session invites experienced producers to open up their real workflows: how they structure XR pipelines from prototype to launch, balance creative ambition with technical constraints and keep teams aligned across disciplines.
16:00 - 17:00
Decolonizing XR and the Politics of Virtual
- Gender & Decolonisation
- Ethical Storytelling
This session looks at how XR can either reproduce colonial power structures or open space for Indigenous sovereignty, ancestral knowledge and community‑led storytelling.
16:00 - 17:00
Paris XR: Future of Immersive Culture in the City
- Immersive Programming
This session maps Paris as a thriving ecosystem for XR and Digital Arts. Programmers, venue directors, and curators will share insider stories about how the city has become a network of innovative digital-art spaces.