The Grand Hotel
Sand Fountain

The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain invites visitors into a world of fleeting passions, chance meetings, memory, and loss. The ambulatory augmented-reality work unfolds as three entangled poetic narratives, individually written and collaboratively shaped by Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher, and Scott Rettberg.

Each narrative path begins with a physical collage and opens a distinct journey through the hotel. Roderick Coover’s path is a spatial narrative assembled from cinematic fragments, hotel architectures, and encounters that slip between recollection and invention. Caitlin Fisher’s path offers an intimate passage through layered objects and voices, where the hotel becomes a shifting structure of memory and desire. Scott Rettberg’s path is a kaleidoscopic journey through brief encounters, unstable rooms, and stories that surface as visitors move through space.

The first work in Visitations: The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell), Sand Fountain, extends one of the imaginary universes suggested by Joseph Cornell’s hotel shadowboxes and Robert Coover’s book The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) (2002). Cornell assembled found images and objects into enigmatic miniature rooms. Coover responded with prose-poem hotels animated by memory, desire, dreams, and despair. Visitations adds a third layer of adaptation, populating those imagined environments with voices, gestures, and unfolding stories.

Visitors move through the work with a tablet or phone. Physical collages open into layered spatial scenes in which images, text, voices, and remembered objects surround the viewer. Personal ephemera encounters generated imagery; human narration meets synthesized speech. Rather than using AI to write the stories, the artists work with generative platforms as part of a broader visual, sonic, and spatial production process.

Platforms used: Adobe Aero, Unity, DALL·E 3, Adobe Photoshop, and ElevenLabs.

Roderick Coover, Caitlin Fisher, and Scott Rettberg bring together experimental cinema, electronic literature, immersive storytelling, and creative technology.

Roderick Coover is a filmmaker, media artist, and professor at Temple University whose work spans interactive documentary, combinatory cinema, virtual reality, and installation.

Caitlin Fisher is an award-winning writer and media artist, professor at York University, and director of its Immersive Storytelling and Augmented Reality labs.

Scott Rettberg is an author, artist, professor of digital culture, and director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen.

Additional development: Julien Pillis and Colin Robinson.

The stories in The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain were written by people and developed through a collaborative exchange of fragments, images, and narrative prompts. The artists used generative systems alongside established editing and production tools to create and transform some images, voices, and spatial materials.

The work approaches AI as one part of an artistic workflow rather than as an autonomous storyteller. Its changes of voice and visual register are integral to a project concerned with unstable memory, adaptation, and the movement of a story from one material form to another.

The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain was made possible with support from the Research Council of Norway through its SAMKUL project scheme, project number 335129 (Extending Digital Narrative), and through its Centers of Excellence scheme, project number 332643 (Center for Digital Narrative). Additional support of dedicated research time and development support comes from the collaborating artists’ institutions: the University of Bergen, Temple University, and York University.

The work was first developed in Adobe Aero and subsequently migrated as the artists continued to explore durable forms for ambulatory augmented-reality storytelling.