Grand Hotel Sand Fountain
Link: https://collection.cdn.uib.no/2025/11/21/the-grand-hotel-sand-fountain/
Artists: Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher, Scott Rettberg
Description: Grand Hotel Sand Fountain invites the public into a world of fabulous encounters. Hotel guests enter a kaleidoscope of entangled narratives collaboratively created by Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher and Scott Rettberg. The XR project extends one of imaginary universes of collage artist, Joseph Cornell, and the late novelist, Robert Coover.
Artist Statement: Grand Hotel Sand Fountain is a collaborative XR project by media artists Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher and Scott Rettberg that extends one of the imaginary universes of Joseph Cornell's collage series, The Grand Hotels, and the late Robert Coover’s book The Grand Hotels of Joseph Cornell. The project takes a kaleidoscopic approach to time, image, language and story through the created of evocative and entangled narratives interweaving past texts and imagined actions. The installation consists of three original, material collage boxes, in the tradition of Cornell's work, that contain within them the triggers for immersive, walkable AR experiences, each of which tell original stories that lead the public into landscapes of longing, danger and discovery.
The poetic narrative is both individually written and collaboratively crafted, the images consist of both deeply personal ephemera and ai-generated works and the narrated audio, too, plays between the human voice and ai-generated speech. Combining the speed of commercial authoring tools (Adobe Aero, 8th wall, Dall-e, Midjourney, Sora etc.) with the necessarily slow pace of writing poetry and building collaborative creative relationships, the work questions the division of technology and humanity and leverages the affordances of XR to engage in fantastical world-building and offers a deeply engaged experiment in Humanistic Intelligence.
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Bio: Roderick Coover, Professor of Film And Media Arts at Temple University has been making expanded and highly experimental cinematic, interactive, immersive experiences since the 1990s. His is the recipient of major awards from Fulbright, Mellon, Whiting, Adam Mickiewicz, APS, CHS and LEF, his works feature in arts venues such as the Venice Biennale, film festivals such as Documenta Madrid, public spaces such as the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and juried festival exhibitions like ISEA, SIGGRAPH and ELO. He also writes about emerging practices and interdisciplinary collaboration in Switching Codes (Chicago) and The Digital Imaginary (Bloomsbury). unknownterritories.org
Caitlin Fisher is a Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University. She is a pioneer in the field of XR storytelling, having won major international awards for her creative work, exhibiting and performing globally. A former Fulbright Research Chair and a CanadaResearch Chair in Digital Culture from 2004-2014, she founded and for two decades has directed York’s pioneering art-science Augmented Reality Lab. She currently directs York’s Immersive Storytelling Lab and serves as President of the Electronic Literature Organization. Most recently she directed Fiery Sparks of Light, a volumetric XR project featuring iconic Canadian women poets, including Margaret Atwood, in partnership with the CFC Media Laband theGriffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry.
Scott Rettberg is an American digital artist and scholar of electronic literature based in Bergen, Norway. He is the co-founder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He leads the Center for Digital Narrative, aNorwegian Centre of Research Excellence from 2023 to 2033. Rettberg is the author or co-author of novel-length works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. His work has been exhibited online and at art venues, including the Beall Center, the Slought Foundation, and The Krannert Art Museum.
