Visitations

The Grand Hotels
(of Joseph Cornell)

Three immersive narrative works revisiting the imaginary hotels of Joseph Cornell and Robert Coover through augmented reality, installation, virtual reality, collaborative writing, and emerging media.

by Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher, and Scott Rettberg

Visitations: The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) takes Robert Coover’s fictional hotels and Joseph Cornell’s enigmatic shadowboxes as the starting point for a third layer of adaptations. Each work explores a different mode of immersive storytelling, bringing new voices, gestures, encounters, and unstable memories into these imagined spaces, while exploring the creative affordances of emerging platforms.

The complete tropical artwork for The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo, with two cockatoos, the hotel, and the work’s title.

2026

The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo

An immersive nest-like installation of recombinant dreams and avian-automatonic fortunes.

Visit Bald Cockatoo
The glass-domed Grand Hotel Galactic Center floating in space.

2026

The Grand Hotel Galactic Center

A narrative virtual-reality hotel of cosmic spectacle, wonder, intolerable labor conditions, and despair.

Visit Galactic Center
The sepia lobby of The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain.

2024–2025

The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain

An ambulatory augmented-reality narrative unfolding along three interwoven paths through a hotel of brief encounters.

Visit Sand Fountain

Visitations: The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) is an artistic research outcome of the Extending Digital Narrative project. It is supported by the Research Council of Norway through its SAMKUL project scheme, project number 335129, and through its Centers of Excellence scheme, project number 332643 (Center for Digital Narrative).