Dates:

23-25 October, 2025 // Prague, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Venue:

Prague, Czech Republic; DOX: Centre For Contemporary Art, Poupětova 1, 170 00 Praha 7-Holešovice

Call for presentation

Hunting for Attention: Interactive Digital Storytelling in Fragmented Attention Landscapes

Immersive storytelling productions often deploy multisensory inputs—such as visuals, sound, touch, and even smell—to create a multidimensional experience that captures and sustains attention. By placing the audience or experiencer at the center of the narrative, these experiences encourage active participation and decision-making, which deepens engagement. Technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality, and games oftentimes expand the boundaries of traditional storytelling, allowing for intricate world-building and for a strong sense of being immersed. This also heavily depends on how much our attention allows us to be engaged, especially given the widespread claim that our attention span has significantly decreased. Due to the prevalence of interactive technological tools and the abundance of content, we are often able to focus for only short periods and are easily distracted.

In this era marked by fragmented attention and the constant influx of information and sensorial inputs, contemporary interactive storytelling creators as well as researchers across many disciplines are exploring various modalities and strategies to capture and sustain audience attention and engagement. Zip-Scene invites submissions that delve into how artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, performers, and other creative practitioners respond to the challenges of diminished attention spans. We encourage explorations of novel narrative structures, interactive experiences, sensory design, and other inventive approaches that aim to break through the noise and foster deeper connections with audiences in a fast-paced world. Besides this, we also recognize the power of linear, non-interactive narratives, which offer psychological immersion that encompasses the focus of the recipient. These artefacts can show us clearly strategies for fostering attentiveness, which makes the audience engage deeply with slow-paced narratives. Contemplative works - particularly the linear, non-interactive formats where engagement may be more passive but can nonetheless be profoundly intellectual and emotionally impactful- offer us new ways of understanding how our attention “used” to work and how it is changing in parallel with the prevalence of interactive formats.

Why “attention” now?

Despite its central role in cognitive science, attention remains difficult to define precisely. The broadest approach considers attention a cognitive concept that determines how particular sensory inputs, perceptual objects, thoughts, or actions are selected for further processing (Covaci et al., 2019).

Since Cherry's (1953) "cocktail party" paradigm, our understanding of attention and how it constructs the hierarchy of focus has evolved significantly (Treisman & Gelade, 1980). Neuropsychology has contributed to this understanding by exploring how different parts of the brain are involved in attention control, including how competition between stimuli takes place when more than one stimulus shares the same receptive field.

This has specific implications for interactive digital storytelling. On the one hand, such experiences require the user's focus and active involvement; on the other hand, they risk overstimulating or overloading the user’s attention. These offer a certain perspective for creators to scrutinize the types of mechanics used by creators of interactive digital narratives and multisensory immersive experiences. Audiovisual narratives, in particular, generate higher levels of shared neural activity among audiences than audio-only formats, suggesting that multimodal storytelling enhances attentional focus and engagement (Dini et al., 2023).

VR creators are increasingly addressing the challenge of attention loss by designing mechanisms to maintain audience engagement (Fisher, Vosmeer, & Barbara, 2022). Generative systems can also be trained to disrupt patterns in order to raise the attention level of the interactor (Karth, Junius, & Kreminski, 2022). Others have responded to this issue through locative cultural storytelling experiences, developing concepts such as Loco-Narrative Harmony. (Millard et al. 2020)

This raises several questions: How is audience attention guided? Do certain techniques inadvertently draw attention away from the narrative itself (Gallistl et al., 2022)? Does the split-attention effect (Mayer & Moreno, 1998) help viewers understand the IDN (interactive digital narratives) better? What multisensory techniques can foster sustained and selective attention? And how can these methods evolve into therapeutic tools?

The Zip-Scene Conference takes XR/extended reality (VR/AR/MR) and Metaverse-related works seriously and treats them on equal footing to film and performing arts, and wishes to expand its scientific treatment and reflection. On this basis, we are inviting papers that address narrative experiences enabled by digital platforms, especially online and XR or related to the Metaverse. We are also looking for IDN practices and prototypes from medical and mental healthcare practices that could offer new approaches on how storytelling can be embedded in scientific practices. Papers should address either one or several of the following topics:

Conference themes:

• Interactive storytelling methods and authoring
• Video games
• Virtual reality experiences & movies
• Augmented reality in interactive storytelling
• Interactive performing arts practices
• Interactive museums and archives
• Immersive environments (media archeology and phenomenological approach)
• Participatory practices using interactive digital storytelling in education, health care and other applied areas
• Interactive storytelling formats and their effect on mental health
• Special track #1: Non-human perspectives in the focus of the attention
• Special track #2: Creator strategies for maintaining attention

General information

The conference is intended as an in-person event in Prague. The organizer reserves the right to make changes to the event program.

Registration fee

100 EUR (physical attendance)

(Reduced registration fee is available upon request)

The fee includes entry to the ART∗VR Festival happening at the same venues. More information about visitor tickets in September.

The organizers cannot cover travel and accommodation costs. Upon request we can provide you with an invitation letter.

For Whom

The conference addresses scientific researchers, game professionals, programmers, artists, scholars and professionals from the fields of performing arts and game studies, as well as interactive storytellers, experience designers, narrative designers, VR-professionals and philosophers and others concerned with the conference topics. The conference aims to bring together emerging scholars, professionals and creators in order to create a joint platform which would help individuals to understand and to develop these types of productions.

This year the conference is organized in cooperation with ART*VR festival, the biggest curated art XR showcase in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. The carefully curated programme aims to present the best in the field of artistic VR creation and immerse the audience in unique, immersive virtual worlds. The programme will showcase the latest projects presented at major festivals such as the Venice Film Biennale, Annecy, Tribeca and SXSW in the USA, and IDFA in Amsterdam. The event also aims to present several projects in international or world premieres.

The festival will have a competitive and non-competitive part and will aim to present VR projects set in physical art installations. The event will take place in the exhibition space of the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art and Prague Planetarium. An important part of the programme is an industry programme for film professionals, a series of lectures on VR and an accompanying programme. A special programme for primary and secondary schools will also take place in the morning of the festival.

Apply

You can apply by uploading your abstract, bio and headshot picture to this Google Form: https://forms.gle/kHbJVwzdiYD7ZwWT7

Deadline for application 1st of July.

Please write us an e-mail after submitting your abstract, so we can double check your application. Reach out here: bakk (@) mome dot hu

Organised by:

Zip-Scene
Art*VR Festival
ARDIN – Association for Research in Digital Interactive Narratives

Strategic partner:

1. Code and Soda Company codeandsoda.com
2. Random Error Studio randomerror.studio
3. Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design

Consultant on behalf of ARDIN/INDCOR:

Hartmut Koenitz