In this paper, we treat VR as a new writing space in the long tradition of inscription. Constructing Virtual Reality (VR) narratives can then be understood as a process of inscribing text in space, and consuming them as a process of "reading" the space. Our research objective is to explore the meaning-making process afforded by spatial narratives-to test whether VR facilitates traditional ways of weaving complex, multiple narrative strands and provides new opportunities for leveraging space. We argue that, as opposed to the linear space of a printed book, a VR narrative space is similar to the physical space of a museum and can be analyzed on three distinct levels: (1) the architecture of the space itself, (2) the collection, and (3) the individual artifacts. To provide a deeper context for designing VR narratives, we designed and implemented a testbed called RealityMedia to explore digital remediations of traditional narrative devices and the spatial, immersive, and interactive affordances of VR. We conducted task-based user study using a VR headset and follow-up qualitative interviews with 20 participants. Our results highlight how the three semantic levels (space, collection, and artifacts) can work together to constitute meaningful narrative experiences in VR.

I en tid då medielandskapet är i ständig förändring och traditionell medieforskning konstant utmanas ökar behovet av att förena teknik, humaniora och samhällsvetenskap. Medie- och teknikforskning kräver innovativa angreppssätt för att navigera bland komplexa relationer mellan kultur, samhälle, ekonomi och teknologi.

I den här boken bjuder ledande forskare in till samtal om teknologins utmaningar och möjligheter. Här presenteras redskap för att utforska, beskriva, begreppsliggöra och förstå nya relationer mellan medieteknologier och deras omvärld – en kunskap som förbereder läsaren att på egen hand kombinera samhällsvetenskapernas kritiska analyser med teknikvetenskapernas tradition att utveckla tillförlitliga och effektiva system.

Tekniska mediestudier riktar sig till studenter inom ämnen som medieteknik, medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap, kulturvetenskap, data- och systemvetenskap, interaktionsdesign och informatik.

The concept of deep reading is defined as the application of higher-order thinking skills to the process of reading. It includes analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight. Deep reading is also often associated with particular media, primarily printed books, preferably certain kinds of literature. This chapter discusses some of the prevalent ideas surrounding notions of focused, critical and valued reading modes and how these are connected to media technologies, implicitly or explicitly. Some scholars, such as Nicholas Carr, have suggested that digital media in general and the kinds of distracted, quick, or hypertextual reading that the Internet provides in particular are detrimental to our ability to focus and engage deeply. Within media studies, however, research has pointed to other equally important aspects of engagement that must be redefined so as not to be inextricably linked to a particular medium or genre.

Digital media conditions shape new forms of reading. We read on a daily basis on various digital platforms: we read books, we search for information while reading on screens, we use apps on our smartphones, and we read audiobooks. A number of these practices challenge the former print-biased definitions of reading to which we are accustomed, and foreground intermedial practices of aesthetic works. They also challenge how we understand the sensory input that is activated while we read such works and in what contexts such reading takes place. The aim of this paper is to present our analysis of  these extended practises of reading in a digital landscape by proposing reading as a travelling concept (Bal 2002) that moves across different media contexts and moves inbetween disciplinary concerns. Central to our analysis is the material and intermedial interplay between medium and material affordances which in turn shapes the reading experience (Hayles 2005). 

By bringing selected research fields and contributions regarding reading into dialogue with each other, we will exemplify what we see are common scholarly issues when analyzing digital reading today, specifically the multisensory address inherent in many digital texts: we are invited to touch, listen, watch, possibly take part in movement and interaction, look at images and text, listen to the timbre of voices of an audiobook reading and so forth. These elements must, we argue, play a larger role when analyzing these distinctly digital reading conditions (reimagining Jerome McGann’s 1991 analyses of the textual condition). In this paper, through analyses of digital reading situations in Tender Claws Pry (2014) and Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) read by Aoife MaMahon that challenge the print bias that is still the foundation of the reading concept, we explore the assumptions and value judgments that imbue the concept of reading. 

The conditions of reading are shaped by materialities of that which is read. In the wake of digital publishing, reading activities have been impacted by the affordances of digital technologies, and the chapter “Reading and materiality: conditions of digital reading” charts some of the influential ideas on the material nature of digital reading, and arguing that print-centric notions of what constitutes “good” reading have at times overshadowed an in-depth reckoning of the role that digital technologies play today. The perceived dichotomy between so-called digitally born and digitized materials does not delineate a border between “digital” and “print” reading, even though many of the assumptions about the latter still permeate perceptions of what is more valuable to read. The digital reading condition that the chapter introduces does not exclude any forms. Rather, the current media moment includes print, audiobooks, printed books in all forms, as well as a multitude of digital forms in a complex, interlocking media economy.

The concept of deep reading is defined as the application of higher-order thinking skills to the process of reading. It includes analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight. Deep reading is also often associated with particular media, primarily printed books, preferably certain kinds of literature. This chapter discusses some of the prevalent ideas surrounding notions of focused, critical and valued reading modes and how these are connected to media technologies, implicitly or explicitly. Some scholars, such as Nicholas Carr, have suggested that digital media in general and the kinds of distracted, quick, or hypertextual reading that the Internet provides in particular are detrimental to our ability to focus and engage deeply. Within media studies, however, research has pointed to other equally important aspects of engagement that must be redefined so as not to be inextricably linked to a particular medium or genre.

Museums have always used different media to communicate, widen perspectives and bring new knowledge, but in the era of digital media, their various offerings are increasingly part of the media ecosystem. Our research interventions explored the possibility of reusing existing digitised material in a participatory setting. The aim was to explore the object-centred audience participatory method in digital settings. We held a series of digital and in-person workshops that invited the participants to “imagine” narratives about the provenance of the museum’s objects and journeys to Sweden in a playful and creative exploration. We could observe how the virtual workshop setting supported focused discussions, and allowed zooming, drawing and remixing of digital photographs to facilitate conversation. The workshop participants on-site worked with the museum objects on display to remediate them through photos, drawings, clay modelling, and writing down thoughts and questions about the objects on discussion postcards. The participants’ contributions were included in the virtual collection database (Carlotta), under the same collection as the other museum objects, making the remediation process circular. We argue that object-centred methods enable audience participation in digital media ecosystems both in museums and with other media makers. The audience’s expectations and experiences from using other media bring them to the digital museum platforms with a willingness to explore, remix and integrate.

Media materiality matters for how reading happens, through digital technologies, print, audio, and so on. However, equally important for our understanding of what happens in each individual reader's experience is the place and situation in which the reading occurs. The surroundings, what the reader is doing while reading, what occurs around them are part of what we discuss in this chapter as situated reading. Our interests go beyond the reading mediation itself to address how the reader's sensing body experiences each reading instance. We seek to decouple the naturalized link between our understanding of what constitutes reading, the medium, and the situations in which reading occurs.

AbstractIn Sweden as well as internationally the teaching and research nexus has been described as the defining charac-teristics of higher education promoting generic skills such as information analysis and critical reflection. Vertically Integrated Projects has been proposed as one educational strategy where research and teaching are linked by in-viting students to take active part in actual research projects. The strategy is well aligned to Scholarship of teaching and learning enabling the transition from a teacher-centred accepted knowledge to a student-centred perspective where students are invited as producers of knowledge. The aim of the current study was to explore students’ experiences of participation in a research-based learning activity with academia and industrial partners, designed as a qualitative explorative study using focus group interviews. Findings describe not only factors students find motivating for learning, but also their experience of being part of professional life with its benefits and challenges.

This volume offers a critical overview of digital reading practices and scholarly efforts to analyze and understand reading in the mediatized landscape. Building on research about digital reading, born-digital literature, and digital audiobooks, The Digital Reading Condition explores reading as part of a broader cultural shift encompassing many forms of media and genres.

Bringing together research from media and literary studies, digital humanities, scholarship on reading and learning, as well as sensory studies and research on multimodal and multisensory media reception, the authors address and challenge print-biased conceptions of reading that are still prevalent in research, whether the reading medium is print or digital. They argue that the act of reading itself is changing, and rather than rejecting digital media as unsuitable for sustained or focused reading practices, they argue that the complex media landscape challenges us to rethink how to define reading as a mediated practice.

Presenting a truly interdisciplinary perspective on digital reading practices, this volume will appeal to scholars and graduate students in communication, media studies, new media and technology, literature, digital humanities, literacy studies, composition, and rhetoric.

This chapter discusses the digital reading condition and multisensory reading from the perspective of journalism, which implies other implications and dimensions than educational or literary reading. Global as well as local news organizations around the world are experimenting with new digital opportunities for presence and engagement of users beyond the written word, and the chapter gives some examples. Framed by the term “immersive journalism,” the chapter presents examples of the use of immersive technologies like 3D models, Augmented and Virtual Reality, and 360° photography and videography. It also suggests to include digital audio formats as examples of journalistic products that are able to create different kinds of sensory and social experiences of presence.

In recent years design with augmented reality applications for cultural heritage purposes have increased and their usefulness for informal learning and tourist experiences is improving (Haugstvedt and Krogstie, 2012; Liestøl 2014). However, there are still significant challenges with using Augmented Reality technology for cultural heritage applications in open urban environments using GPS location. Even if the potential for rich experiences is great, the continued lack of precision of available GPS location and direction in smart phones create particular challenges for the interaction and experience design. This paper presents the experiences from a project that underwent several iterations in 2017 and 2018, using mobile Augmented Reality and 360 panoramic photography in a mobile application that foregrounded historical narratives in urban heritage environments. Specifically, the narratives were about the colonial past in the Danish capital Copenhagen, a past whose traces are still present in the architecture and history of noted places such as the famous Tivoli in the city as well as in archives and museums. This contested and fragmented colonial past live in digital archives that require design and exhibition practices in order to find their way to a larger audience. 

Our project Finding Alberta was one such intervention. The extended reality (XR) web-based application, using a now depreciated platform called Argon (Speiginer et al 2015) but which was created using web programming and therefore is transferable, was part of a larger set of experiences, workshops and installations that brought to life black persons who were once taken to Denmark from the Virgin Islands, then under Danish rule. The point of the urban AR experience was to let the visitor follow in the footsteps of two children - Victor and Alberta - in order to better comprehend their lives and ultimately their fate in Denmark, from the human exhibition to early death of Alberta in 1917. However, the difficulty of properly leading visitors to GPS points and understand fully in what directions they are facing once they reach those points proved a design challenge that we were only partially able to successfully work around. This paper presents some of the design choices we made in order to still create a compelling experience while working around the limits of the affordances of mobile AR.

Vad kan falska nyheter, VR-glasögon och aktivitetsarmband lära oss om medieteknik som forskningsämne? Med utgångspunkt i tre forskningsbaserade exempel introducerar vi beräkningsmedier som ett nyckelbegrepp för framtida medieteknisk forskning. Begreppet bidrar till att ta fram digitala teknologiers datafierande karaktär och deras inflytande på relationen mellan människor och deras kroppar, mellan medier och vad som uppfattas vara verkligt i en medialiserad värld. Detta hjälper oss att bedriva vetenskaplig forskning inom ämnet medieteknik på sätt som både skapar förståelse för och bidrar till utvecklingen av digitala medier med hänsyn till deras tekniska, sociala, kulturella och ekonomiska förutsättningar.

Att läsa digitalt, på en datorskärm eller annan enhet, skiljer sig från att läsa på papper. Syftet med den här webbtexten är att fler ska få kunskap om digital läsning. Det är också en viktig förberedelse inför digitaliseringen av de nationella proven.

How augmented reality and virtual reality are taking their places in contemporary media culture alongside film and television.

This book positions augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) firmly in contemporary media culture. The authors view AR and VR not as the latest hyped technologies but as media—the latest in a series of what they term “reality media,” taking their place alongside film and television. Reality media inserts a layer of media between us and our perception of the world; AR and VR do not replace reality but refashion a reality for us. Each reality medium mediates and remediates; each offers a new representation that we implicitly compare to our experience of the world in itself but also through other media.

The authors show that as forms of reality media emerge, they not only chart a future path for media culture, but also redefine media past. With AR and VR in mind, then, we can recognize their precursors in eighteenth-century panoramas and the Broadway lights of the 1930s. A digital version of Reality Media, available through the book's website, invites readers to visit a series of virtual rooms featuring interactivity, 3-D models, videos, images, and texts that explore the themes of the book.

We report here on an application of reality media(virtual and augmented reality) to digital culturalheritage. The particular challenge we address is:how to combine VR and AR to bridge the gap betweenthe center (the museum housing cultural artifacts)and periphery (the heritage site where theartifacts were found) while at the same time attendingto, even enhancing, the aura of both artifacts andsites? Our proposed solution is to implement thecultural heritage technique known as situated simulation(sitsim) in combination with a social virtual environmentcalled Hubs. Our case study is a sitsim ofthe Acropolis in Athens, which can function on locationand remotely and offers real-time conferencingcapabilities for its participants.

The article discusses modes of reading that emerge from reading situationsthat involve literary digital interfaces and digital audiobooks. Building onanalyses of sensorial characteristics of the act of reading a digital audiobook and aliterary digital app, respectively, the article presents and defines the concept of multisensoryreading. This concept emphasizes the literary work’s material and performative features, as well as the experienced reading situation. The authors explore how the digital literary interface changes reading situations and argue that newreading habits create a need to renegotiate what it means to read in a digital age.In particular, sensory aspects can be understood as integrally involved in what theyterm the digital reading condition.

In this article, the authors examine the aesthetics of immersion in two emerging media forms: 360° video and 3D VR. Their goal is to move beyond addressing technical affordances, to consider the techniques and choices that producers of 360° video and 3D VR are making to exploit these affordances, and what resulting effects those viewing experiences have. They discuss the tension between transparency and reflectivity in two contrasting examples, in particular: the Danish company Makropol’s Anthropia (2017) and Arora and Unseld’s The Day the World Changed (2018). The authors argue that technical affordances are part of a complex process of mediation that includes both experimentation with the technology at hand and a reliance on earlier media forms. It is critical, they argue, to understand the creative tension between established forms and new ones that underscore new aesthetic and narrative experiences in VR and 360° formats.

This paper presents an ongoing experiment using WebXR to create something analogous to a non-fiction book in AR and VR; an immersive, interactive experience that stands on its own, rather than merely complementing a traditional book. The book introduces the reader/user to AR and VR both as technologies and as media. The printed book is one of the more influential communicative interfaces in history. AR and VR have the potential to remediate several genres of printed books, but somewhat different conventions may need to be developed for different combinations of genre and modality. The lessons learned through this experiment should contribute to the establishment of guidelines for this new form of multimedia, in particular conventions that facilitate the reader/user’s transition from discursive to immersive modes and back.

A re-materialisation of the visual in terms of viscosity is provided by this article. The argument is grounded in practical design processes from on-going research in the integration of archival material into AR/MR environments (Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality). This is an approach to emergent materiality not because new materials are invented but because existing visual, digital and traditional craft materials are re-configured. The archival material we use for this project is visual rather than textual, and it portrays moving bodies. The re-materialisation happens through experimentation with materials, affect and perception. Visual materialities, in this case viscosity, rely on a phenomenological approach to vision whereby design materials cannot be separated from the active perception of the designers, the participants and even the materials themselves. This article outlines the final iteration of the AffeXity project where glass was used as a design material to enhance viscous materiality. Viscosity is experienced as depth, layers, stickiness, reflections, motion, and an affective quality of dreaminess or the passage of time.

This paper presents a series of mobile Augmented Reality Experiences focusing on the postcolonial history of various sites in Copenhagen, Denmark. The applications—Bitter&Sweet & Finding Alberta—are part of a university-led research project, situated at the now closed Royal Cast Collection of the Copenhagen National Gallery and in the city itself. Using site-specific archival material for contemporary experiences in an urban landscape, the design process deals in part with contested sites and sensitive histories, while the application tells the story of colonial pasts in a Danish context. We will discuss the process of designing for a locative, embodied experience; the challenges of providing an embodied and compelling experience for visitors both inside and outside of buildings; and the challenges of designing for the wider urban landscape, given the constraints of a small screen and the limitations of the mobile device.

As digital media increasingly become entangled with urban culture, new cultural practices emerge and affect how we understand and experience contemporary cities. The experience of place alongside digitally mediated content has been a focal point for media artists and researchers working in the field of locative media in the past decade. The term locative media refers to how interactive media is bound to a specific location, or in McCullough’s term how digital media moves into “sites and situations of everyday urban life” ( 2006). This presentation focuses on the ongoing work of the design and artistic research project “City Fables.” We reflect on the role of fiction in participatory engagement and how the remediation of historical events can provide input for public debates that address the relationship of everyday life to larger political and cultural events. In particular, our approach takes seriously the potential of narrativization and possible worlds explorations through methods of, what we in our work have called, “fableing.” In our project, the fableing is performed upon historical material from Malmö 1900-- ‐1925 in order to design a locative media experience, connected to specific sites in Malmö. Historical moments and people have the potential to serve as counterpoint to the stories and realities of contemporary cities, and we work with fictionalizing characters and events as a way of informing public debate. In particular, we stress how constituting publics foregrounds an engagement with authority structures (LeDantec and DiSalvio, 2013). From this perspective official archives can be seen as one such authority structure, providing specific facts and viewpoints. By contrast, remediating and fictionalizing in public settings create an experimental zone, which does not rely on one actor, but rather integrates the translations of a multitude. This in turn highlights knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and agency in a similar way as design labs (Smördahl and Stuedahl, 2015). The presentation will position the project in the context of other similar research projects and raises issues of representation, identity and participation in the context of practical design work as well as the reconceptualization of representational practices. References Le Dantec, Christopher and DiSalvio, Carl, (2013) Infrastructuring and the formation of publics in participatory design, Social Studies of Science 43(2) 241–264 McCullough, Malcolm. (2006). On the Urbanism of Locative Media [Media and the City]. Places, 18(2), 26. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/84x6m3nf Stuedahl, Dagny and Smördal, Ole (2015), Matters of becoming, experimental zones for making museums public with social media, CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts Volume 11, Issue 3--‐4, 2015

Turmoil Alley/Larmgränd is an interactive exhibition that uses mixed media: paper and digital film in a mobile application that employs image recognition. The work consists of two posters with houses from Malmö, Sweden which are used as a canvas for story fragments about people who lived and worked in Malmö between 1900 and 1925. To access these fragments, the user uses her iPhone and the Argon web AR application (created by the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology with whom we have collaborated).

This article reveals a multi layered design process that occurs at the intersection between postcolonial/decolonial theory and a version of digital sketching called Embodied Digital Sketching (EDS). The result of this particular intersection of theory and practice is called Bitter & Sweet, a Mixed Reality design prototype using cultural heritage material. Postcolonial and decolonial strategies informed both analytic and practical phases of the design process. A further contribution to the design field is the reminder that design interventions in the current political and economic climate are frequently bi-directional: designers may enact, but simultaneously external events intervene in design processes. Bitter & Sweet reveals intersecting layers of power and control when design processes deal with sensitive cultural topics.

This paper analyzes the dual aesthetics of procedurality and narrativity in interactive documentaries. Arguing against Lev Manovich’s notion that database as symbolic form precludes narrative (1998), the paper explores the particularities of the interface and the structure of story elements in interactive documentaries. Digital hybrid objects such as interactive documentaries embed within their aesthetic and interactional construction many forms of aesthetic, cultural, and narrativized organizations and influences that a medium-centric understanding of digital media fails to capture. The paper focuses on an analysis of Jonathan Harris’s “I Love Your Work” (2013), asking the question: what kind of stories does Harris’s experimentation produce? The work relies on a procedural logic in its process of production (Harris took ten seconds of video every five minutes for ten days). There is also an aesthetics of procedurality and seriality evident in its interface aesthetics, which Harris calls a “tapestry,” that structures the documentary in 10 second increments available to the viewer through the online interface. The paper argues that the database as structure and procedurality as aesthetic process do not preclude narrative arcs with beginnings and ends; these arcs just look different. "I Love Your Work" and similar projects challenge the simplification of database structures as minimizing story, calling us to include in our analyses interface design, computational algorithms, and multimodality as part of narrative structures and paratexts. I argue—analogously to the classic statement in computer science: algorithms + data structures equals programs (Wirth 1975)—that procedural digital interfaces that rely on database structures, recombinatory interactive choices for the reader, and minimal narrative units can create serial narratives. Building on Brian McHale’s spectrum of narrativity with oscillating states between “trip” and “mission” (2011), I suggest that the trajectories of procedural watching that occur in “I Love Your Work” produce weak narratives that invoke the episodic and the picaresque. The interactive documentary thus serves as an example of how various instances of narrativity occur in digital forms and the paper shows how the confluence of reactive interfaces and malleable computational media along with shifting reader and author positions generate potentialities for the documentary form along a spectrum of weak and strong narrativity.

The article reviews the work of American programmer and artist Jonathan Harris, who is an example of contemporary born-digital interactive storytelling. His work centers around an aesthetics of procedurality that is invoked by the database structures that his work uses. In a series of digital photography and film media projects, for instance The Whale Hunt (2007), Today (2010), and most recently Network Effect (2015) Harris combines large sets of photographs, video clips and text snippets into composite works. Harris’s 2013 project I Love Your Work has thus far received the most attention. Described as an “interactive documentary” it comprises 2, 202 ten-second video clips that Harris filmed while following nine different women as they went about their everyday life.

The ubiquitous nature of mobile and pervasive computing has begun to reshape and complicate our notions of space, time, and identity. In this collection, over thirty internationally recognized contributors reflect on ubiquitous computing’s implications for the ways in which we interact with our environments, experience time, and develop identities individually and socially. Interviews with working media artists lend further perspectives on these cultural transformations. Drawing on cultural theory, new media art studies, human-computer interaction theory, and software studies, this cutting-edge book critically unpacks the complex ubiquity-effects confronting us every day. The companion website can be found here: http://ubiquity.dk

We explore design strategies for mixed reality (MR) in relation to Milgram's definition, which has been central to its development in the past 20 years. We argue for the need to rethink the technical focus of this definition in order to capture the experiential dimensions of MR and offer a humanistic framework for a growing class of experiences that we label MRx. We list three characteristics of MRx applications (esthetic, performative and social) and provide a context for the three subsequent articles in this special issue.

From a media studies perspective MRx is a form of writing, and specifically a form of inscription, a writing in space or on places. A key quality that distinguishes MRx from MR is an attention to the aesthetics of the experience. To examine the aesthetic dimension of writing is to ask: what it “feels like” to read and write according to an accepted set of practices. MR applications are tactile and proprioceptive, and MRx experiences further explore and make us aware of this multi-sensory engagement. MRx experiences are in this sense polyaesthetic, and as such they exhibit the qualities: seriality, weakened narrative and altered trace. The polyaesthetics of MRx experiences is explored in a series of example of digital art and public display, such as Blast Theory's Rider Spoke and the projection on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris to mark the finish of the 2013 Tour de France.

In this article, we bring together the lenses of media studies, performance studies and social interaction offered in the other essays in this special issue and discuss their collective contribution towards a more nuanced understanding of MRx. We illustrate this capacity by a brief critical review of a recent MRx environment: Mégaphone. We suggest how the lenses can also contribute to a design vocabulary for future MRx experiences.

The Argon project was started to explore the creation of Augmented Reality applications with web technology. We have found this approach to be particularly useful for community-based applications. The Argon web browser has gone through two versions, informed by the work of our students and collaborators on these kinds of applications. In this paper, we highlight a number of the applications we and others have created, what we learned from them, and how our experiences creating these applications informed the design of Argon2 and the requirements for the next version, Argon3.

Most readers of Convergence will have some familiarity with the developing digital media forms that go under the name of augmented reality and mixed reality (MAR or separately, AR and MR). The widespread availability of smart phones in the last 10 years has redefined AR and MR that had previously been confined to the laboratory. Smart phones and tablets have become the platform for a variety of applications in which digital text, images, video, and audio are overlaid on the screen and appear to be present in the space around the user. In addition, the smart phone or tablet can typically determine the user’s location in the world and orientation in his/her immediate environment. Along with the commercial uses for location-sensitive advertising, new forms of cultural expression (e.g. for art, design, and social media) are beginning to appear. Appropriately for this journal, these new forms can best be studied by a convergence of disciplines, including media studies, art history, literary theory, philosophy (particularly phenomenology), interaction design, sociology, anthropology, communication studies, human–computer interaction, and computer science. Many of these disciplines are represented in the contributions in this special issue that focuses on the ways in which AR and MR participate in cultural expression in today’s heterogeneous media economy. Do AR and MR constitute a new medium? What are the specific qualities of the new medium that give rise to new forms of cultural expression? Are AR and MR two different media with different characteristic qualities and affordances? Over the past two decades, computer scientists have analyzed AR and MR as media forms from their own technical and operational perspectives (e.g. Milgram and Kashino, 1994). These questions are addressed from artistic and theoretical perspectives by the contributions to this special issue.

This article explores the notion of polyaesthetics as a contemporary media condition that relates to questions of production, reception and analysis of media objects. Primarily, the paper is concerned with understanding the aesthetics of digital media works that remediate existing genres of creative practice and ultimately move towards creating new digital media forms that are conditional and provisional.The three digital works that the article analyses – The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Upgrade Soul and The Vampyre of Time and Memory – exemplify contemporary strategies and changing patterns of creation, distribution and reception evidenced in how we create, read, listen to, engage with, play and understand contemporary digital works.

This paper is concerned with aesthetic explorations of tactility and sensuality that contemporary multitouch gesture technologies offer. I explore the provocative performative space that is created in the feedback loop of the (popular) modernist interface design and engineering of Apple’s various iPhones and iPads and the multifarious aesthetic, musical, graphic, and textual interfaces of applications created by musicians, artists and writers. The paper is grounded in a comparative analysis of interfaces, focusing on the “dance of gestures” and its tight link to representation via that digital touch, the movement of the device, and the interfacial aesthetic elements of sound, image, and text. Among the interfaces/experiences studied are Björk’s biophilia, Opertoon’s Strange Rain, Jörg Piringer’s abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and Jason Edward Lewis’s Speak. The dialogic between interface design and engineered interaction of the iPad’s LCD touchscreen extends to the user who, through sensory engagement, partakes in the aesthetic event. The paper argues that the touch-based works foreground a performative event, or, as I call it, an instance of polyaesthetics.