Symposium on Virtualisation & Culture

International Symposium & NETWORKING EVENT on Virtualisation and Culture

8-9 & 16 December 2025, University of Twente

With the support of the BMS Strategic Research Fund and the UT DesignLab.

Call for Papers

We live increasingly virtual lives in an increasingly virtualising world. Due to the proliferation of immersive technologies such as VR/XR/AR, the virtualisation of our modern culture proceeds in such unprecedented ways that some argue that the age of the real has come to an end and we are now facing the age of “virtualism” (Söffner 2024) due to a “virtual revolution” (Steinicke 2016). Ever more aspects of our everyday lives happen in virtual environments, transforming our experiences and ourselves. We need to understand what digital virtualisation implies for Culture, not only as artistic production and heritage, but also as a complex cognitive, symbolic, creative, and interactive activity. 

Aspects of virtualisation have been noted by scholars: disembodiment, desensitisation, digital waste, externalisation of cognition, change in the perception of time and space. But we still lack an understanding of what these developments entail for us as humans and the expectations we have from interactions, collective practices, representation and interpretation, and, ultimately, meaning making: the very fabric of Culture. These take new forms and follow new rules as they happen in very specific technological environments, which are themselves physical (e.g. as servers or immersion devices) but in ways different from the phenomena and processes they simulate. We also need to ask a broader question: What is the relationship between the virtual and the cultural? Given that many forms of virtuality—such as imagination (e.g. in film, literature) and the believed transcendence (e.g. in religion)—have always been key cultural drivers, what makes digital virtualisation different? In what sense is present-day virtuality expressive of human nature or disruptive to the human condition? 

Our symposium aims at bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, as well as culture, heritage, and creative professionals, to exchange insights about the underlying principles of virtualisation in and of Culture.  

Our topics include, but are not limited to: 

❖     The nature of technology-driven virtuality and its main attributes.
❖     Digital vs. non-digital forms of virtuality.
❖     The absent as cultural and technological artefact.
❖     Ideology and ontology in and of virtualisation.
❖     The virtual as a cultural driver and/or cultural modifier.
❖     Virtualisation & the cognitive and embodied foundations of culture.
❖     Disembodiment in a virtualised culture: loss, replacement, and translation.
❖     The effects of immersive technologies on cultural production and experience.
❖     Virtualisation, the human condition, and humanist values.
❖     The effects of pan-digitalisation on the experience of life, life events, and
personal wellbeing (esp. empirical evidence and examples).
❖     Sub/countercultures: resilience, resistance, adaptation with and to virtualisation.
❖     Digital waste/literacy and the changing perceptions of sustainability & nature.
❖     Imagining, both in arts (e.g. film) and science (e.g. scenarios), of humanity—as well as
habitats and the environment—in a virtualised future.     

We welcome the electronic submission of abstracts (max. 300 words) by 1 November 2025 to the email virtualised.culture.symposium@gmail.com. For more information, please contact the organisers, dr. Athanasios Votsis (a.votsis@utwente.nl) and dr. Dina Babushkina (d.babushkina@utwente.nl).