Vol. 23 No. 40 (2023): Archaeologies of the Virtual. Materialities, Senses, Imaginaries

Edited by Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Wanda Strauven, and Simone Venturini

Even though it is often presented as an unprecedented technology, virtual reality is a new medium as much as it is an old one, and an imaginary one. Virtual technologies have been long foreshadowed by intermedia fictional worlds, anticipated by the virtualisation of visuality that took shape during Modernity, and even prefigured by the multifarious attempts to realise the immersion of the spectator, which can be traced back to the most ancient forms of human art and image-making techniques. In order to understand this changing mediascape, the role of a media-archaeological approach to the virtual lies not only in restoring lines of continuity with the past, but in providing different frameworks to critically interrogate the process of virtualisation of the environment, which exceeds the state of present-day media technologies. In this perspective, the issue aims to investigate the material and corporeal conditions, catalysing multisensory spectatorship and the concretisation of immersive media, as much as the epistemic and imaginary constructs which support and underpin them.