The Future of Text ’25 was hosted at The Royal Society in London, UK Thursday November 27th 2025 from 9 til 5 by Ismail Serageldin, Dene Grigar & Frode Hegland, with a theme of ‘a multitude of perspectives’.
We asked: What can it be like to unfold the promise of working in a richly interactive knowledge environment?
Further photographs from the pre-Symposium dinner the casual next day social, as well as the running order with draft presentations.
Presentations
A full video of the day (with moderate audio and some sections not recording) is available: Full Day. Please note that this was primarily an in-person event. Summaries and videos of each part of the day are available below:
Part 1
Dene Grigar, Frode Hegland, Fabien Bénétou Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Project: Authorship in XR • Dene Grigar Making Physical Artifacts from Virtual Museums Accessible • Mark Anderson On the difference between exploring & creation of knowledge in XR • Alexandra Martin 1P1 collection
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Part 2
Tom Haymes Object to Idea: Information Paradigms at the Dawn of AI • Andreea Ion Cojocaru The Textual Border • Sam Brooker The Chloropyll Moment • Frode Hegland Text That Does Something (explicit lyrics) • Fabien Bénétou XR Experiences
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Part 3
Ken Pfeuffer The Growing Complexity of Everyday Devices • Mariusz Pisarski A postcard from (hyper) reality • Lyle Skains When Cut, It Multiplies: Hydraen Perspectives and Archontic Sprawl in Digital Narrative • Vincent Murphy Twilight of the Printocene & the Dawn of Ludicity
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Part 4
Vint Cerf Early Explorations in XR Library Thinking • Tess Rafferty Augmented Creativity: The Future Of Writing In XR • Alan Kay Surprise Guest • Keith Martin Working’ in XR • Dave Millard After Documents • Bob Stein Tapestry of Knowledge • Alessio Antonini Authoring for AI • Paul Smart & Rob Clowes Building AGI One Word at a Time • Ken Perlin Future glasses and future text
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Participant Comments
”Excellent symposium.”
Bob Stein
“I was astonished by the sheer breadth of topics discussed in a single day.”
Ken Perlin
“I’m so grateful to Frode & Dene for creating this space where we can be intellectually stimulated while discussing the nuances of complex issues and also be allowed to be dreamers.”
Tess Rafferty
“Congratulations on such a well-organised symposium!”
Jonathan Finn
“It was exhilarating to be part of a day where so many different people with different perspectives on the Future of Text could share their ideas, experiences, projects, and tools. I found the group open and excited, tackling ethical and technical challenges—just the kind of creative stimulation we need!”
Lyle Skains
“The day was a rare opportunity to step out of the urgency of the present and think together about what our shared future could look like. The symposium brought together an unusually rich mix of researchers and practitioners. I left with a renewed sense of what’s possible.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff
“It’s a great source of inspiration to be in a company of smart people who share the same concern and care about the future of text. You could jump into a conversation with anyone and immediately be on the same page – a rare occurrence, a symposiums in its truest, ancient sense.”
Mariusz Pisarski
“I enjoyed this symposium a lot! It brought together diverse scientific and industry perspectives to reimagine how we experience text in the future with AI and XR, offered insider stories from the tech world, and created space to connect with thoughtful, open-minded people. Thanks a lot to Dene & Frode as welcoming and great hosts.”
Ken Pfeuffer
“My favourite gathering – a meeting of engaged and engaging voices from a breadth of backgrounds, all keen to discuss their own vision of the future.”
Sam Brooker
“This Future of Text was a rare and extraordinary gathering, what made it so was its refusal to be bound by the usual division of labour between thinkers and doers. Here were some of the planet’s most cognitively engaged minds for whom deep thought and tangible creation aren’t sequential steps but simultaneous acts with each informing the other in real time. This is the embodiment of the future we are living through right now, a time of flux where the fixed certainties of our Printocene era are being suffused into one where constant fluid dynamic flow of information is the norm. We can only hope that soon all gatherings will embody such a useful productive fusion and thus make us far better equipped to face our shared uncertain future.”
Vincent Murphy
“The symposium explores the boundaries of the possible and imagines ways to break through them, leading to deep and constructive conversations that I’m still digesting.”
Tom Haymes
“It was illuminating to attend a Symposium that gave us a deeper insight into creative technologies with multi-use abilities and their potential application across a variety of domains. It was exciting and stimulating to listen to passionate experts present their ideas within a supportive community of practice dedicated to critically thinking about both the preservation and the future of text.”
Rebekah Kennel & Tony Stern
XR
This year and last year was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which has enabled us to host dialog and implement Reading & Authoring in XR which has resulted in live, interactive WebXR experiences for Meta Quest, Apple Vision Pro and other devices.
Introduction
In this quest we are not limited to VR/AR/XR (though this is where our current research lies). We also look at pen and physical paper, academic digital papers, digital tablet, printed books, reams of sketches and beyond. We look for richly interactive knowledge environments in all of the instantiations of text.
Such an environment cannot come from a canned demo, a single company’s product or even a research project such as we are doing, all by itself. We firmly believe that richly interactive knowledge environments can only be unleashed through all of the above, in deep and engaging dialog.
This is why we host weekly open office dialog, the annual Symposium which has been going for over a decade and that is why we are putting together the sixth volume of the book on The Future of Text.
And this is why we invite you to join us. The future of text is literally and figuratively in our common hands, where we can develop a truly extended cognitive reality. You can see what we have been up to in the Future Text Lab, where you can see the record of our open office dialog, experience our XR experiments. You can join us any given Monday, just look at the Future Text Lab website.
Co-Chairs
We Dream, We Wonder
We dream of richly connected reading, richly connected writing and richly interactive views of our information. We dream of using technologies to truly augment how we learn, think and communicate, not to outsource our thinking, agency and ownership of our common future.
We wonder how the challenging problem of organizing the knowledge of our thoughts and sources in space could be improved through XR and not only be made into a ‘bigger mess’–how we can interact to clarify—how we can fold and unfold knowledge, how we can connect and see connections. How we can truly extend our brains into a rich spatial experience outside the confines of our skulls to degrees traditional media has never been able to deliver.
By the Numbers
Number of In-Person Participants: 30 including presenters
Number of Presentations/Presenters: 21 (plus 1 un-scheduled by Alan Kay)
Gender Representation: 8 participants identify as women, 22 as men
Number of Graduate Students: 1
Countries Represented: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, United Kingdom & United States.
This Symposium and Book is sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Electronic Literature Lab, and the Augmented Text Company
