M/C Journal

Introduction: Experience as Contested Territory When Gardening Australia became the first program to broadcast with audio description (AD) on the ABC in 2020, the national broadcaster received complaints from sighted viewers about why their televisions were suddenly talking to them. This accessibility feature describes important visual information between lines of dialogue to ensure audiences who are blind or have low vision have a comparable experience to people who can see the action unfold. In response to viewer complaints but wanting the AD audience to feel included, the producers of Gardening Australia integrated the new feature in a segment featuring Costa smelling a flower. In a watershed moment for Australian television, Costa explained what AD was, who benefitted from it, and how to turn it off. Despite benefitting so many people, AD was introduced in Australia quietly and with seemingly minimal audience response (Department of Communications and the Arts). While researchers and advocates knew there was a demand for AD (Ellis et al.), there have been consistent gaps and silences in achieving the type of critical feedback required to provide effective, engaging and consistent AD. However, as several critical disability scholars have highlighted (Hadley; Ellcessor), there are multiple reasons that impact on audience responses to media texts and accessibility features. In undertaking this research, we acknowledge the relational nature of access; both the constant emphasis on disclosure (Kerschbaum 55), and the (unpaid) emotional labour and problematic "accommodations loop" (Price 73) people with disability experience to justify and re-justify accessibility needs (Dolmage). The specific nature of AD, both often invisible and, until recently, isolated in production, may further compound these challenges. In this article we examine the "footprint" of social media responses to AD during the 2012–2025 period in which AD first emerged on Australian screens via ABC AD trials, Netflix, and its eventual provision on ABC and SBS and their catchup services. We focus on the transformative period between 2020 and 2025, when dedicated funding enabled Australia's national broadcasters to move from trial programs to sustained AD services. Prior to this, Australia was the only English-speaking nation in the OECD not to offer AD on broadcast television. The article presents an analysis of collected data from Facebook and Reddit posts responding to media or network AD promotions, as well as posts from AD, blind, and low vision groups in Australia. Responses and engagements with AD promotions and discussions were analysed to capture the experiences of AD, beyond the focus groups or survey feedback traditionally used by media producers. While limited to engagements from social media users, it also allows for informal expressions—both positive and negative—and for reflections from a diverse audience, including but not limited to the blind and low vision community. Theoretical Framework: Embodied Media Experience and Accessibility We ground our analysis of AD as an embodied phenomenon in critical disability studies, accessibility, and translation studies. Scholarly examination of AD proceeds from translational studies, media accessibility, and universal design principles (Mazur). While distinct disciplinary approaches, the embodied experience of AD has been at the centre of each tradition of AD research. Within translational studies, researchers conceptualise AD as a form of translation—the process of converting visual elements into verbal descriptions. This framework has yielded two significant insights. First, global legislative frameworks mandating AD provision remain sparse and inconsistent. Second, cultural variations substantially influence AD practices, as demonstrated by Orero's comparative analysis of American, Spanish, and Greek audio describers, which revealed marked differences in descriptive priorities when working with identical visual content (Orero). Research recognises that user preferences vary across the blind and low vision community, with no “one-size-fits-all” approach (Jiang et al. 1). However, other research suggests that even along the spectrum of vision impairment, AD preferences are not as distinct as expected (Chmiel and Mazur 565). The absence of unified international standards for AD implementation (Fryer) has resulted in diverse national approaches to both script development and delivery technologies (Orero). Australia's Department of Communications and the Arts identified this lack of standardisation as a primary obstacle to AD implementation in their 2017 Audio Description Working Group's Final Report. The absence of established standards has enabled innovation in the provision of AD, yielding valuable insights into user experience (Walczak and Fryer). More interpretive styles have been found to better convey emotional aspects of film (Bardini; Walczak and Fryer). Instances where directors have developed AD positively influence audiences' experiences while at the same time changing these directors' creative practice (Naraine et al.; Whitfield and Fels). Media Accessibility approaches position AD as a critical accommodation for blind and low vision audiences, framing it within social inclusion and human rights discourse (Ellis et al.). AD significantly enhances the user experience and comprehension of media texts (Khang Dang and Lee; Raffi). Media accessibility perspectives recognise television and other media platforms as vehicles for community participation, providing collective access to significant events, news coverage, and cultural content. The universal design approach has gained momentum as researchers increasingly examine how AD shapes user experiences through consumer advocacy and human rights frameworks, where experiential insights and industry creativity are reshaping AD delivery models (Ellis and Peaty 135). This scholarly direction recognises that accessibility features developed to enhance experiences for specific populations often generate broader experiential benefits, aligning with established digital accessibility trends and universal design philosophy (Bownlee; Locke and Leaver; Reena). Research examining mainstream AD adoption and user experiences (Ellis) exemplifies how disability-focussed innovations can transform media experiences for diverse audiences. Universal design creates mainstream products and services that optimise experiential usability across diverse populations without requiring specialised modifications. In the context of AD, there is an increasing interest in the universal design potential of AD. For example, research from the Macerata Opera Festival in 2018 indicates that AD improved the experience for both blind or partially sighted patrons and their sighted companions (Raffi). Studies across each discipline suggest a complex interaction between varying user preferences, describer approaches, and platform- and geographical specificity. AD therefore is fundamentally about embodied experience and the ways unique physical bodies, senses, and cognitive processes shape our interaction with technology. This article proceeds from this critical disability perspective, recognising that disability is the result of a complex interaction between bodies, environments, and cultural practices (Garland-Thomson). In this framework, disability is viewed as neither entirely medical (medical model) nor solely social (social model), but as a series of material, social, cultural, political, and other contextual influences and experiences. The embodied experience of AD exemplifies this complex interplay, as it emerges not simply as a technical accommodation for vision impairment, but as a culturally situated practice that reshapes the material encounter between bodies, media environments, and narrative meaning-making. This argument is further highlighted in the analysis of social media posts made by Australians about audio description between 2020 and 2025, a time during which AD was introduced on Australian television networks. Methodology: Social Media as Experience Archive There are many approaches to analysing social media posts and traces, all of which must make significant assumptions and orientations in terms of the way any social media utterance is valued and contextualised, including assumptions about the extent to which posts reflect a broader embodied experience. For posts made in relation to AD, the lived experiences of accessibility, especially for the imagined AD audiences of blind or low-vision audiences, are vital. For this analysis, these assumptions have led the researchers to situate social media posts not as a broader discourse to be understood holistically, but rather as offering windows of documented embodied experience that are not otherwise available outside of direct interview and explicit user testimony, but require as much consideration and interpretation. Zizi Papacharissi has convincingly argued that digital and social media analysis can effectively provide a window onto ‘affective publics’, spaces where the stories, ideas, and values of specific communities and groups cohere, are retold, and are amplified in particular ways. Social media are necessarily an incomplete and imperfect representation of communities that span digital and physical spaces, but are nevertheless a form of community and communication that is visible and accessible to researchers without further impinging on time-poor groups. Social media thus can act as a reasonable proxy for group sentiment and opinion. Moreover, while certain forms of accessibility are relatively visual and apparent, others (including AD) are often occluded and mostly invisible without being explicitly raised by users and audiences. Thus, social media for this project can illuminate otherwise hidden moments of documented experience appearing online, but always already situated in embodied and accessibility contexts. Our study focussed on two social media platforms, Facebook and Reddit, as relatively stable social media platforms at the time, and ones which are used by blind and low vision communities (noting that previously Twitter has been an active space for this community, but with its transition to "X", historical data are no longer available, and the platform itself more resistant to research and researchers; Bruns). Researchers conducted a broad Google search of public posts (source: Reddit; source: Facebook) using a variety of related terms: "audio description", "AD", "audio descriptive", "audio described", "blind", "blindness", in conjunction with Australia-specific and platform terms: "Australia", "ABC", "SBS", "Stan", "Binge", and "Netflix", "Vision Australia", "BCA". A closer analysis of posts within related groups (e.g. "Audio Description Discussion") or threads (r/audiodescription) was also conducted. Noting consistent references to specific programmes, the research terms were extended to include: "Gardening Australia", "Bluey", and "Nas Campanella" (a blind reporter for the ABC). 75 comments were analysed across two social media platforms; 71% of responses were from Facebook, and 29% from Reddit. There are several factors which impacted on the relatively small quantity of comments that were found and analaysed. Firstly, the search was limited by geographical reference (to Australian content or platforms) and time (starting from the month/year that AD was introduced to Australian broadcast television: May 2020—April 2025). Audio description was introduced to Australian television via trials conducted by the ABC in 2012 and 2015-16. Outside these trials, AD did not otherwise exist on Australian broadcast television until its introduction on both national broadcasters in 2020. Netflix came to Australia in 2015, coincidentally about the same time as the streaming service introduced AD. As other streamers followed, some also provided AD. Preliminary research noted that in 2012 there was no feedback on the AD trials via Facebook or Reddit as they were not well established as fora for feedback, reviews, and discussion of TV content. In 2015, the comments sections of television posts were more lively, however the ABC had a policy of not promoting the AD trial (Department of Communications and the Arts 11), thus also impacting on the quanitity of engagement via social media. After the formal introduction of AD in 2020, the volume of posts about AD by SBS and the ABC increased markedly. Secondly, in their early iterations Facebook and other social media platforms were notoriously inaccessible for people who were blind or had low vision. It was only after considerable campaigning that Facebook worked with the American Foundation of the Blind to improve accessibility (Ellis and Kent 129). Both the perception and the reality of this inaccessibility might also contribute to the low usage of social media platforms by blind and low vision AD users. Ellis et al.'s 2019 findings that many Australians were unfamiliar with AD are supported by the negative feedback from sighted Australians to the introduction of AD on broadcast television in 2012 and 2020 (ABC 18). Technical issues meant that some televisions played AD automatically, confusing people who had not heard of AD. Despite these limitations, the data reveal significant patterns around broadcaster preferences, sentiment towards AD services, and specific show discussions. Findings: Multiple Experiential Worlds The findings from our canvassing of social media comments on AD in Australia reveal the importance of access experience and quality content-driven provision. But the results also point to the fragmented nature of AD consumption. This sits uncomfortably beside the dominant discourse of AD audiences—clearly defined in literature (predominantly from the UK and US) as an accessibility feature for the homogenous blind and low vision community (Holsanova; Pergeo and Taylor). Moreover, the sparsity of vocal audience engagement with AD services (as described by one broadcasting service provider, "there have been no [feedback] at all for audio description in all of these years. I don't think I can remember a single enquiry at all about audio description") has perpetuated assumptions about the "intended user". In doing so, assumptions are not only made about the intended users’ "bodies, cultures, and technologies" (Ellcessor 64), but also of unintended audiences and unintended experiences of AD broadly. Intended Experiences: BLV Community Engagement While the "intended users" of AD were evident in responses, with several (9) self-disclosing their disability in their comments, the vast majority could not be discernible as posts from members of the blind and low vision audience. While beyond the scope of this article, the use and limitations of social media for the blind and low vision community requires further analysis (Whitney and Kolar 461). The sparse but meaningful participation by actual AD users prompted quality discussions (particularly in specialised communities) about voice, localisation, and technical aspects. These discussions also evoked international comparisons (notably in the r/Blind community), community-based sharing, and advice seeking. The specialised community discussions about synthetic versus human voices, accent matching, and local knowledge in scripting reveal sophisticated user preferences that contrast with the limited quality feedback in mainstream spaces. User frustrations about AD not transferring between platforms and countries (which become evident as posts about content missing AD in Australia are expressed and confirmed on international social media platforms) point to systemic issues in how accessibility features are implemented across different media ecosystems, warranting discussion of policy and technical solutions. The dominance of the ABC as the first national broadcaster to provide AD on its broadcast and catch-up platform was evident, noted in 34 posts. The ABC were the original poster (either marketing AD itself or specific programs for which AD was available), and as a result ABC content was likewise discussed, with blind reporter Nas Campanella, Gardening Australia, and children's television cartoon Bluey all referenced in multiple posts. Unintended Experiences: Mainstream Appropriation Indeed, the high engagement with specific, popular programming across the data divulged a series of unintended experiences and audiences for AD. Comments by sighted users, and families and friends of blind and low vision individuals, noted discovering AD as background listening, a language learning tool, and in adding depth and details to children's content. While these alternative audiences for AD have been noted in research over the last decade, there remains a clear omission in marketing to and including these diverse audiences in AD production and distribution. Resistant Experiences: Technology as Disruption Some posts revealed initial experiences for audiences with full vision who encountered AD accidentally, interpreting AD not as an accessibility option, but rather presuming it to be part of the mainstream experience of that media form. For example, one post highlighted a viewer who thought that a television programme had begun to include a new narrator in the show, only to be informed by others afterwards about the existence of AD as an optional technology. Other viewers aware of AD lamented that it was at times hard to locate and turn off, sometimes as a response to encountering content that featured AD for the first time, and discovering that their device had always had AD turned on, but that they had not before viewed a show that actually utilised the AD capacity. For audiences seeking AD content, the increased availability of AD on some streaming platforms was notably not available to users with older televisions, or the experience of streaming and broadcast was different enough to present new and unique challenges making this accessibility feature, ironically, harder to access. Conclusion: Toward Inclusive Experience Design and Co-Creating Accessible Experiences AD creates an equitable media experience for people who are blind or have low vision. However, social media discussions about AD reveal fundamental tensions between different experiential paradigms—from the embodied, sensory experience of blind and low vision users to the often-dismissive experiences of sighted audiences—highlighting how accessibility technologies create multiple, sometimes conflicting forms of media engagement. These different user experiences reveal both promising shifts for how media, culture, and experience intersect, and a persistent fundamental tension between different sectors of the imagined television audience. The coexistence of sighted and blind users in mainstream AD discussions suggests AD could become community-centred and integral to design, rather than an accessibility add-on. Across both groups, important insights about technology (old and new), cultural preferences, and the broader media culture demonstrate how media accessibility interpolates with both shared cultural experiences (Australian accents, local knowledge) and unique individual needs (specific vision conditions, personal preferences). Technical frustrations, from turning the feature off to incompatible televisions to platform migration failures, illuminate assumptions about technological literacy and infrastructure access. When AD fails to transfer between services, it reveals accessibility treated as an add-on rather than core design principle. These barriers reflect user experience paradigms that assume universal access to current technology while overlooking compounded barriers facing disabled communities. Sophisticated discussions within blind and low vision communities about synthetic versus human voices, accent authenticity, and cultural context demonstrate how users incorporate media consumption with lived experiences in ways that challenge simplified accessibility assumptions. Audio description becomes cultural practice intersecting with identity, place, and community belonging, not merely functional accommodation. As the burgeoning Australian AD market has developed in recent years, AD providers have struggled to understand the lived experiences of their blind and low vision audience members. While traditional feedback mechanisms often fall short, social media platforms have emerged as spaces where users document and discuss their encounters with audio-described content. This study examines social media discourse about AD to better understand how Australian users experience this accessibility service in their daily media consumption to analyse the nuanced ways audiences engage with, critique, and celebrate AD as part of their viewing experiences. In concluding this article, we echo calls evident in the social media discussion for AD guidelines and standards to be co-created with disabled communities. True participatory design requires recognising disabled users as accessibility experts whose knowledge should fundamentally shape media technology conception, development, and implementation. As we reflect on the evolving landscape of AD translation, accessible media, and universal design in the context of AI now entering the AD creation space, we predict increasing cultural and technical complexity. Questions of lived versus apparent experience that will ultimately be raised in this landscape call for more inclusive consultation processes. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Report to Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Audio Description Trial on ABC Television, Dec. 2012. . Bardini, Floriane. "Film Language, Film Emotions and the Experience of Blind and Partially Sighted Viewers: A Reception Study." The Journal of Specialised Translation 33 (2020): 259-80. . Bownlee, John. "How Designing for Disabled People Is Giving Google an Edge." Co.Design, 23 May 2016. . Bruns, Axel. “The Death of Twitter and the Decline of Public Debate Online.” M/C Journal 29.2 (2026). . Chmiel, Agnieszka, and Iwona Mazur. "A Homogenous or Heterogeneous Audience? Audio Description Preferences of Persons with Congenital Blindness, Non-Congenital Blindness and Low Vision." Perspectives 30.3 (2021): 552-67. . Department of Communications and the Arts. "Audio Description Working Group—Final Report." Australian Government, 2017. . Dolmage, Jay Timothy. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2013. Ellcessor, Elizabeth. Restricted Access. New York: NYU P, 2016. Ellis, Katie. Disability and Digital Television Cultures: Representation, Access, and Reception. London: Routledge, 2019. Ellis, Katie, and Gwyneth Peaty. "Audio Description as Transmedia." Transmedia Cultures: A Companion. Ed. Simon Bacon. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021. 135-42. Ellis, Katie and Michael Kent. Disability and New Media. London: Routledge, 2011. . Ellis, Katie, Mike Kent, and Kathryn Locke "Audio Description and Australian Television: A Position Paper." Curtin University, 2018. . Fryer, Louise. 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The body knows before the mind does. A chest tightens over an image of an empty chair. The hands will not put the book down. A line of poetry activates something behind the sternum that has no name in the critical vocabulary, and so the scholar, trained in distance, sets it aside. This article argues that what gets set aside is not noise but data: the body's participation in reading is a condition of critical thought rather than an obstacle to it. It proposes neuroaffective reading as a method for treating embodied, affective, and temporally uneven engagement with texts as analytically productive rather than as other to a discipline trained to keep the body out of the argument. The term "neuroaffective" signals a double orientation. It draws on Critical Neurodivergent Studies, the framework I set out in "Uploading the Mask" (Ezzy, "Uploading the Mask"; Ezzy, Critical Neurodivergent Studies), which insists that neurodivergent ways of processing produce knowledge rather than merely deviating from it (Walker 31; Yergeau 45–7). It also draws on affect theory as a tradition that takes seriously what happens in and between bodies when texts circulate. Affect, as Brian Massumi argues, is not emotion named and contained but intensity in motion, a bodily capacity that precedes and exceeds conscious feeling (25–28). Reading, on these terms, is never a purely cognitive act but a sensory event. By "neuroaffective", a term this article coins, I mean the somatic, affective, and attentional traffic between a work and a reading body. A neuroaffective reading treats that traffic, its intensities, rhythms, and residues, as evidence, and takes neurodivergent embodiment as an epistemic resource rather than as a confound to be controlled. The article outlines a practical framework, demonstrated through three contrasting texts: Oliver Jeffers's picture book The Heart and the Bottle, a lyric poem from Ellen van Neerven's Comfort Food, and Maggie Nelson's fragmentary essay Bluets. Each stages a different encounter between text and nervous system, and no two nervous systems stage it identically; the readings that follow are offered not as claims about what every reader must feel but as demonstrations of a method each reader brings to their own embodied particularity. The same text layers different loads on different bodies according to sensory profile, cultural memory, and lived experience; we have simply been trained not to notice. Affect, Embodiment, and the Problem of the Trained Reader Academic reading, as conventionally taught, operates according to a set of unspoken somatic instructions. Moderate your response. Maintain critical distance. Do not linger, do not be undone. Rita Felski names the disciplinary mood that underwrites these instructions: critique as a suspicious, guarded vigilance that has come to define what professional reading feels like (1–3). I name this ensemble of instructions the neuronormative reading contract: the tacit agreement that a competent reader will process texts at a neurotypical pace and intensity. The claim is scoped to a dominant training, not to academia entire. Phenomenological traditions return to their texts across readings; feminist scholars have organised a politics of slow scholarship against the accelerated university (Mountz et al.); Indigenous knowledge traditions have long practised sustained, ethically attentive engagement. Neuroaffective reading is an ally of these practices, not a correction to them. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identified one consequence of the training in her account of paranoid reading: a hermeneutic posture oriented toward suspicion, mastery, and the anticipation of bad news (123–4). But Sedgwick also insisted that reparative postures were possible, characterised by surprise, hope, and what she called "texture", the quality of a surface as felt by the reading body (13–5). Neuroaffective reading takes the reparative turn seriously and extends it into territory she did not fully explore: neurodivergent bodies as sites of critical knowledge. Teresa Brennan's account of affect is useful here: it is not generated privately within individual subjects but moves between bodies, altering physiology as it goes (1–5). A text, on this account, is not a container of meaning to be opened by interpretation. It is a transmitter. The reader who feels their breathing change over a page-turn is not having a merely private reaction that critical method is entitled to discount; the response is subjective only in the trivial sense that all response is, and subjectivity does not disqualify it as evidence. For neurodivergent readers these dynamics are often amplified. Autistic processing frequently, though not uniformly, involves heightened sensory sensitivity, intense pattern recognition, and perseverative attachment to objects of interest (Yergeau 53–5); the style labelled ADHD involves, in many presentations, uneven attention, hyperfocus, and affective dysregulation that makes the boundary between reader and text porous (Ashinoff and Abu-Akel 1–5). These are not deficits but processing styles that generate distinctive knowledge moderated reading cannot access. Neuroaffective reading does not require the reader to be neurodivergent, but it takes neurodivergent embodiment as an epistemic resource: a way of knowing what texts do to bodies that the instruction to moderate, distance, and move on has obscured. Bessel van der Kolk's account of the body keeping the score of what the mind cannot yet narrate shows somatic knowledge preceding propositional knowledge (van der Kolk); neuroaffective reading carries that insight from the clinic to the reading chair. A Practical Framework A note on the term first. Neuroaffective reading is my own coinage; the adjective circulates in the brain sciences (Panksepp 9–15) but has not before named a literary-critical method, and it inherits from the queer reading practices that first taught the discipline that how one reads is itself political, an inheritance Nick Walker's account of neuroqueering makes explicit (Walker). The framework routes several traditions through neurodivergent bodies as readers: Sedgwick's reparative reading (123–51), Brennan's affective transmission (1–5), Kathleen Stewart's ordinary affects (1–7), the autoethnographic treatment of the researcher's body as evidence (Adams et al. 21–6), and, in its fifth commitment, Lauren Berlant's attachments to objects that go on mattering (23–7). What follows is organised around five methodological commitments, each treating embodied response as data rather than distraction. The first is bodily notation: the systematic tracking of physical responses during and immediately after reading, muscle tension, breath changes, postural adjustments, and the often-overlooked interoceptive signals of gut feeling, chest pressure, throat constriction. These are not metaphors but somatic events, and they constitute evidence about what a text is doing at the level of the autonomic nervous system. The second is attention mapping: documenting where hyperfocus lands, where attention scatters, where the eye returns compulsively, and where it refuses to settle. The neuroaffective reader treats this unevenness as a map of the text's affective architecture, the way it organises intensity. The third is repetition and return. Rereading is not a failure of comprehension but a form of critical practice. The compulsion to return, to a sentence, an image, a page-turn, is the text exercising an affective pull that conventional method would resolve prematurely. The fourth is temporal unevenness. Reading does not happen at a uniform pace: some passages metabolise quickly, others require hours, days, or repeated encounters across years. The method values the slow and recursive as conditions of deep engagement rather than signs of inefficiency. The fifth is affective persistence: the refusal to let go of a text's emotional demands, to continue being reorganised by a work long after the encounter is supposedly complete. What is coded as a failure of professional boundaries is not the persistence but its visible affect, and neuroaffective reading reframes that visibility as ethical attention: a willingness to remain answerable to what a text has asked of the body. In practice the commitments are kept with humble instruments: a reading journal recording somatic events alongside the passages that produced them, marginal notation marking where breath changed or attention snagged, a log of returns. None of this requires apparatus beyond a pencil, only the decision to treat such notations as part of the scholarly record rather than as private residue to be cleaned from the argument. Reading One: The Chest Knows First Oliver Jeffers's The Heart and the Bottle tells of a girl who, after a devastating loss, removes her heart and places it in a bottle for safekeeping; without it the world loses its wonder, and only when a younger child helps her break the bottle open does feeling return. The narrative is spare; the illustrations do the affective labour, distributed across word, image, and the page-turn. Multimodal literacy scholarship makes a cognate point: meaning in the picture book is produced in the traffic between word, image, and design (Serafini). Consider what happens in the body at the page-turn that marks the loss. The spread before it shows the girl and a grandparent sharing a chair by a window against a warm palette, their wonder rendered as collage. Then the page turns, and the chair is empty, the palette cooled to moonlit greys and blues. No text explains. The body responds before reflective interpretation arrives. On a phenomenological account the body is already interpretive, the vehicle of being-in-the-world rather than its antecedent (Merleau-Ponty); what is marked here is the interval between registration and articulate reading. There is a stillness in the chest, not metaphorical but physiological, a held breath, a tightening around the sternum. The autonomic nervous system registers the withdrawal of warmth and produces a constriction that mirrors what the protagonist is about to do: enclose her heart. This is what Brennan means by the transmission of affect (1–5). The text has altered the reader's physiology before saying anything interpretable. For neurodivergent readers whose sensory processing amplifies interoceptive signals, this page-turn can be almost unbearable. The conventional move would name the technique, visual absence signifying grief, and advance. Neuroaffective reading refuses the advance and asks what happens if you stay, if you refuse the page-turn and sit with the shared-chair spread, letting the body anticipate a loss it now knows is coming. The page-turn reveals itself as an affective threshold, and the reader's impulse to manage the intensity of the preceding image, to turn the page, to contain, is the bottle. Hyperfocus lands not on the dramatic images but on these transitional thresholds. Reading Two: The Mouth Remembers Ellen van Neerven's Comfort Food operates in a register at once intimate and political, grounded in Mununjali Country (Beaudesert region, south-east Queensland) and in the sensory textures of food, family, and belonging. They are poems of embodied sovereignty, of nourishment as political practice, sovereignty meant in Aileen Moreton-Robinson's sense: not a status conferred from outside but an ontological belonging carried in and by the body (Moreton-Robinson). A neuroaffective reading begins in the mouth, not because reading happens there but because that is where the poems land first. Van Neerven's language does not simply describe food; it activates the gustatory and tactile systems, so that lines about cooking generate the phantom warmth of a kitchen. These are somatic events, what Eugene Gendlin called the felt sense (32–7), produced by the interaction between linguistic texture and sensory memory. The body participates in the poem before the mind arrives at meaning, and the knowledge produced is about relation, about what it means to receive sustenance from Country: it exists in the body's response and nowhere else. Attention mapping reveals a distinctive architecture: the poems draw hyperfocus toward small sensory details, a texture, a taste, a quality of light, then open with sudden force into wider political significance. What the reader's body brings matters: a reader raised on these foods meets the poems through recognition, one outside the culture through curiosity, itself a bodily orientation that opens the sensorium toward what it does not yet know. For the non-Indigenous reader that difference is part of the method's data: the poems make palpable the position from which one reads, a discipline Jeanine Leane has argued settler readers rarely practise and always need (Leane). "Chips" is the clearest case: the foodstuff draws hyperfocus through repetition before the poem opens onto the violence of the national dialogue, the shift in scale registering in the body before cognition catches up. The turn arrives as a question that answers itself: "what is happening / with the dialogue of this country / they are killing people with words" (van Neerven 21). Temporal unevenness is especially productive here: van Neerven's poems do not yield their full resonance on a single encounter, and each return activates different bodily responses depending on what the reader brings, hunger, grief, tenderness, the memory of a kitchen. The poem is not a fixed object to be decoded but a living relation, and the body keeps knowing differently. Reading Three: The Book That Will Not Let You Go Maggie Nelson's Bluets is a fragmentary essay: 240 numbered propositions about the colour blue, desire, loss, and the body. Its form anticipates the method. On the page it borrows the look of philosophy, short prose blocks headed by numerals and islanded in white space, and its associative structure mirrors the way neurodivergent attention moves through material: not linearly but in loops, spirals, and sudden lateral leaps (Yergeau 53–5). The work's refusal to resolve its emotional contradictions demands precisely the affective persistence that conventional reading would treat as a problem. Bluets does not ask to be mastered. It asks to be carried. Bodily notation produces an unusual finding. Where Jeffers's picture book generates a dramatic somatic event, the chest-constriction, the held breath, Bluets produces something subtler and sustained: a recalibration of the sensorium. Reading the propositions, the body enters a state of heightened chromatic awareness; blue begins to appear in the peripheral visual field, and attention sharpens and diffuses at once, as if the text were tuning the nervous system to a frequency it does not ordinarily occupy. This is what Massumi would recognise as affect in its autonomic dimension, a shift in the body's capacity to be affected, prior to and in excess of any conscious emotional state (25–7). Nelson's propositions produce not feeling in the conventional sense but a readiness for feeling, an orientation toward blue that persists outside the text, colouring perception for hours after the book is closed. Attention mapping reveals that Bluets distributes intensity unevenly across its numbered sections. Hyperfocus does not land where conventional analysis would predict, not on the sections dealing explicitly with loss or desire, but on apparently minor propositions: a description of light, a reference to a pigment, a syntactic turn the body registers as significant before the mind can say why. Mapped across multiple readings, these patterns expose the text's affective infrastructure, the way it distributes weight below the level of propositional content. The body reads the architecture before the mind reads the argument. These findings sit alongside the reception of Bluets as autotheory (Fournier 1–7); neuroaffective reading adds an account of what the fragment form does to the reading body. Repetition and return are central because the text is structured around them. Nelson returns to blue, to the beloved, to suffering, in loops that intensify rather than resolve, and the reader's own compulsion to return extends that logic. Here Sara Ahmed's stickiness is operative: the text accumulates affective charge with each return, becoming more capable of acting on the body (89–92). The reader who carries Bluets for years is not failing to finish but in the middle of a neuroaffective reading that has no terminal point. What Neuroaffective Reading Exposes These three readings, across the picture book, the lyric poem, and the fragmentary essay, demonstrate that the method generates critical insights unavailable to approaches requiring the reader to moderate embodied response. But it does more than produce new readings: it exposes normative assumptions embedded in academic cultures of interpretation, so naturalised they operate beneath notice. The first is that good reading is moderate reading. Scholarly training teaches readers to temper response, to achieve a distance coded as objectivity but functioning as affective regulation calibrated to neurotypical norms. The reader who cannot stop rereading, who feels a text in the gut for weeks, is positioned as unprofessional rather than attentive. Neuroaffective reading reveals this moderation as a disciplinary choice, one that systematically excludes readers whose bodies do not conform to its rhythms. The second is that reading should be efficient. The expectation that a competent reader processes texts in a single pass reflects a productivist logic; some texts require encounters that unfold over months or years, and the knowledge produced by the fifteenth reading is not the same as the first. The third is that care is unprofessional. The scholar who cares too visibly risks being perceived as lacking rigour. As feminist and disability scholars have long argued, the labour of caring is consistently coded as intellectually less serious than the labour of critique, a devaluation documented across accounts of dependency work, care ethics, and crip theory (Ahmed 12–4; Kittay 29–35; Puig de la Bellacasa 1–10; Piepzna-Samarasinha 32–41). Neuroaffective reading revalues care as a critical practice: sustained emotional engagement is not the absence of rigour but a different and necessary form of it. Neuroaffective reading does not claim a universal account of the reading body; embodied response is shaped by disability, race, gender, class, and cultural context in ways the method cannot flatten. For the same reason the article speaks, wherever it can, of neurodivergent bodies in the plural: there is no single neurodivergent body, only particular bodies made to share a political label. What it does claim is that the systematic exclusion of embodied engagement from scholarly reading represents an epistemic loss, one particularly damaging for neurodivergent scholars but impoverishing for the discipline as a whole. Conclusion Neuroaffective reading is proposed not as a replacement for existing methods but as an inclusive framework that expands what counts as critical reading. It asks scholars to notice the body, to attend to the chest, the hands, the gut, the quality of attention itself, and to treat what the body knows as evidence rather than interference. Demonstrated across a picture book, a poetry collection, and a fragmentary essay, the method produces knowledge that embodied engagement made possible and that distance would have foreclosed. The body reads. It has always read. Neuroaffective reading is simply the decision to listen. References Adams, Tony E., et al. Autoethnography: Understanding Qualitative Research. Oxford UP, 2015. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Ashinoff, Brandon K., and Ahmad Abu-Akel. “Hyperfocus: The Forgotten Frontier of Attention.” Psychological Research 85.1 (2021): 1–19. Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke UP, 2011. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004. Ezzy, Tess. Critical Neurodivergent Studies. Vernon Press, forthcoming. ———. “Uploading the Mask: Late Diagnosis, Paternal Loss, and the Neurodivergent Afterlife.” M/C Journal 29.3 (2026). DOI: 10.5204/mcj.3274. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. U of Chicago P, 2015. Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT P, 2021. Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. 2nd ed. Bantam Books, 1981. Jeffers, Oliver. The Heart and the Bottle. HarperCollins, 2010. Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. Routledge, 1999. Leane, Jeanine. “Other People’s Stories.” Overland 225 (2016). . Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP, 2002. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Routledge, 2012. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. U of Minnesota P, 2015. Mountz, Alison, et al. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14.4 (2015): 1235–59. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford UP, 1998. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003. Serafini, Frank. Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy. Teachers College Press, 2014. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP, 2007. Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014. Van Neerven, Ellen. Comfort Food. U of Queensland P, 2016. Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press, 2021. Yergeau, M. Remi. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke UP, 2018.

The experience of visual arts is synonymous with exploring new ways of thinking and making in the studio. As a practice-led researcher, I explore in this article how my acts of ‘translation’ serve as catalyst and intervention to my familiar approaches to studio practice; specifically, I explore my experience translating videogame tropes into figurative painting. Translation goes beyond the reworking of a text for a new audience or language. Broadly speaking, translation is any attempt to shift meaning, content, or expression between different modalities, while intending to preserve an essence of the original. In the context of visual arts practice, this term still encompasses shifts between cultural and linguistic frameworks, but also between alternative modes of representation (words and images) and different creative disciplines. It is not difficult to apply conceptions of cultural translation to studio practice as both culture and artmaking are performed and embodied. Culture is expressed socially as a living framework, not simply as reflections of a “fixed tablet of tradition” (Bhabha 2). Artmaking is undeniably intertwined with the cultures and contexts from which artists practice, while engaging with art necessitates reiterative acts of communication and interpretation. Just as with cultural translation, creative practice negotiates conceptual and material shifts between different approaches to thinking and making. Cultural Translation and Creativity Dialogue between different positions, perspectives, and/or practices is a source of creativity and emergence; all dialogue between difference necessitates some level of translation. Influential cultural theorist Nikos Papastergiadis argues that translation embodies transformation and innovation through a “robust process of mutation, appropriation, assemblage and reconfiguration” (7). This is a process where cultural entities move from one cultural framework to another as they are reactivated, recoded, and re-evaluated within (and by) the frameworks of the recipient; however, when entities move between frameworks, there is always an “unevenness or non-equivalence [that] inspires both a lament for what is lost in translation and a celebration of the extension in conceptual understanding through creative improvisation and hybridization” (Papastergiadis 5). Improvisation may reveal similarities between positions, but there will always be “an uneven fit” (Papastergiadis 5) that ensures an accurate replication of meaning cannot be absolute. Attempts to bridge incommensurability often lead to novelty and critical self-reflection; seminal cultural theorist Homi Bhabha asserts that it is from negotiations between different, competing, and even antagonistic priorities and practices that new understandings and hybridities emerge (210–1). From a creativity standpoint, translation is an outward-looking process that embraces new ideas, establishes new connections, and shows a “commitment to imagining” alternative ways of being (Papastergiadis 11)—or as cultural and literary theorist Caryl Emerson aptly posits, translation is never about seeking perfect interpretations but being liberated by its impossibility (110–1). This impossibility is not just a practical limitation, but also at times an ethical one. Regarding notions of cultural opacity and transparency, seminal poets and scholars Édouard Glissant (see ‘Poetics of Relation’) and Fred Moten (see ‘Black and Blur’), remind us in their influential texts that culture does not need to be completely understood or articulated—made transparent—to still be respected, engaged with, or legitimised by those outside of them (for further discussion, refer to See & Amorim 59–60). Translation between Modalities Studio practice innately demands moving between different modalities of expression, representation, and knowledge as ideas are interrogated through the artist’s praxis of theory and practice. Thinking through materials in this way, therefore, also demands improvising connections between the unevenness or non-equivalence of these modalities. Intermodality is often encountered when artists must work with both the tacit or embodied knowledge embedded in materials and processes and that of written and spoken language; this process is formalised further through exegetical writing, didactic labels, and artist talks. Influential art theorist Barbara Bolt describes this as the “double articulation” of practice that is central to practice-led research (29). Theorist Jillian Hamilton highlights the tension that emerges when artist-researchers must rationalise the subjective nature of studio practice—describing “a push and pull upon meaning and interpretation; between the analytical and the experiential” (3). Tension notwithstanding, translating ideas between different modes of thinking and making is valuable to facilitate critical insights and reflections; however, the materiality and experience embedded in artefacts can demand considerable improvisation to bridge between the logic and aesthetics of spoken and written language, and vice versa. The notion of translation is also relevant to visual arts’ inherent interdisciplinarity; this is not interdisciplinarity in terms of an artist and scientist co-exploring a problem via the space between their disciplinary perspectives. Rather, theorist and artist Mieke Bal argues that all cultural artefacts are inherently interdisciplinary and cannot “be confined to categories such as ‘painting,’ ‘sculpture,’ or ‘film,’ [as] the awareness has grown that not only now but always, many artworks fit uneasily in the disciplinary categories designed for their study” (2). Bal outlines her argument while analysing Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s 2008 video work, ‘WHERE IS WHERE?’, as she identifies at least seven disciplines, including history, cinema, theatre, politics, language, literature, and philosophy. Bal makes a clear distinction between of and as, stating that Ahtila’s artwork is of the cinematic and of the philosophical—in sharp contrast to cinema as philosophical—as "to ‘give’ philosophical status to cinema is different from explaining cinema philosophically” (11). Bal adds that just as this interdisciplinarity is inevitable, it is equally impossible to make full use of the entire paradigms and methodological packages of these disciplines. Nor is it possible for any individual to be knowledgeable in the canonical texts whose importance these disciplines tend to take for granted. This confronts us with the primary challenge interdisciplinarity poses. (3–4) Disciplines are not required to (nor can) be on ‘equal footing’, nor are their connections “harmonious and blending” (Bal 5). Approaching the creation and interpretation of artworks from Bal’s perspective is not to divide disciplinary integrations into separate studies, but to explore the connections that form between disciplines. For me, integrations took the form of adopting and adapting (a.k.a. translating) videogame tropes into my approach to painting (for a more in-depth discussion, refer to See 253–4). A Practice-Led Approach Embracing translation as a catalyst to disrupt and expand my approaches to painting was undertaken within a practice-led research (PLR) methodology. In PLR, creative practice is the animating force behind scholarly inquiry as insights emerge through the studio materials and methods familiar to the researcher (Bolt 28–9). Data takes the form of studio artefacts and experiences, which are contextualised, interpreted, and theorised through exegetical writing. My data predominantly constitutes painting and drawing, along with studio documentation through journalling, photography, and videography; insights emerge through critical analysis and reflection on data in dialogue with relevant creative and cultural theory. Bolt asserts that when thinking through materials, knowledge forms through the rigorous and responsive “handling [of] materials in practice” (29) in dialogue with the broader contexts and theories that inform how that practice is performed. Drawing on Bolt, theorist Katve-Kaisa Kontturi posits how art emerges from a “complex ecology of participation” (21) from which artists follow their more-than-human collaborators. Kontturi (2018) uses more-than-human to describe the material, conceptual, and temporal qualities that artists activate through practice. To pursue new ways of thinking and making, artists must first locate themselves within the ecology from which they participate. One such way is by acknowledging the key cultural texts and artefacts that have informed their practice, especially those beyond the silo of our primary disciplines. For me, this meant acknowledging how influential videogames are to my approach to painting. PLR has an inherently “outward-looking attitude” (Gray and Malins 21) that encourages the incorporation of other research methods, theories and paradigms. It is this attitude that both revealed videogames as an influence, and facilitated its exploratory integration into painting. Videogames into Painting Curator and author Anthony Bond once commented how a generation of Australian artists learned to paint from magazines and books; situated far from the galleries of Europe and North America, printed media were their window to their Western contemporaries and traditional canons, but at the same time translated the material qualities of these cultural artefacts into flat photographic reproduction. If these artists experienced cultural artefacts through books and magazines, then I did so through digital, interactive media. Born 3 years after Bond’s 1987 comments, my formative years were not spent in art galleries but playing videogames. Once thought to be a frivolous pastime that sat outside of my creative practice, this medium was my first meaningful experience with cultural texts and artefacts; more specifically, playing videogames was my first deep engagement with how a creative medium might approach visual storytelling. Acknowledging that videogames are influenced by preceding traditions of painting (see Szymański; Hemraj), my art education was somewhat in reverse, pausing my first career as an industrial and digital designer—which did involve some novice attempts at game development—to attend art school in my mid-twenties. As videogames implicitly draw on long-established pictorial conventions from the history of painting, my reincorporation of videogames into my paintings illustrates a cycle of cross-medial translation. With reference to Bal’s conception of interdisciplinary, my practice is both of the painterly and of the ludological; however, these disciplines are not on equal footing as connections between them are explored through a painting-led dialogue. As such, attempts were made to translate videogame tropes and storytelling devices into painting, not the other way around. My initial approach to painting—before attempting such translations—was typified by my interest in exploring notions of duality through fictional landscapes (fig. 1). I had recently returned from China and was inspired by Ming Dynasty painter Shen Zhou (1427–1509), specifically his c. 1467 scroll painting Lofty Mount Lu that dwarfs tiny figures within grand, awe-inspiring natural surroundings. Fig. 1: Twins (Herod), oil on board, 61cm x 92cm. Harrison Waed See, 2019. As both painting and videogames are arguably visual media, there were many moments of harmony—exploring how a painting could adopt videogame storytelling and aesthetic conventions. However, it is the potential for discordance between these two media that led to the most novelty. More conceptual integrations, such as player agency, choice, and replayability—the ability to replay a game segment to explore different outcomes—required more improvisation to bridge. It is naïve to suggest that these two concepts are absent from painting: from a Deleuzian perspective, this medium can indeed affect visual, emotional, or conceptual interaction with its audience that can undeniably create an immersive experience (see Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties; and Difference and Repetition). In terms of replayability, the interpretation of any cultural text (paintings included) is never fixed as it can be revisited/reiterated by audiences of different sociotemporalities to produce alternative readings (Bakhtin 280–5). The potential for alternative readings, however, is still distinct from how a videogame explicitly presents audiences with alternative experiences as the result of different in-game choices. Emulating the potential to feature alternative choices-cum-outcomes in painting meant emphasising the plurality of the storytelling embedded within my landscapes. I moved away from any single, overarching narrative and started layering multiple, at times contradicting, micronarratives. Each micronarrative inferred an alternative replay of the same landscape. Instead of rendering the concept of ‘alternative choice’ as a visual metaphor, I found it more engaging to render potential outcomes of those alternative choices as to let the audience fill in the gaps. For example, rather than rendering clichéd visual metaphors like a forked path or an array of signposts, I layer (or palimpsest) the same figure but wearing different equipment or clothing—or the same scene but featuring different flora or infrastructure—to prompt an imagining or hypothesising about the cause of these changes. To remain within the scope of this paper, I briefly focus on two videogame tropes that I translated into painting: ‘HUD elements’ and ‘aggregate figures’. HUD Elements I found that integrating non-diegetic elements utilised in videogame heads-up-displays (HUDs) was a particularly useful and often subtle means of embedding plurality into my paintings. A HUD overlay is part of videogames’ broader user interface (UI) that offers information to a player about the in-game mechanics of characters and environments that would otherwise be unseen. Common HUD elements include, but are not limited to: health bars, minimaps, status icons, countdown timers, ammunition counters, equipment slots, subtitles or dialogue, score points, or navigation markers. I first began experimenting with how to translate these elements into paintings by dissolving this diegetic/non-diegetic binary, and having figures engage with health bars or minimaps as part of the landscape. However, I found the most potential for plurality when keeping this binary intact, and using HUD elements to encourage extensions, reinterpretations, and in some cases contradictions about what might otherwise be taken for granted in a painting. Examples include attributing status icons, health bars, or equipment slots to figures or objects to reveal things not otherwise represented in the scene (figs. 2 and 3). Fig. 2: Detail of Clear Skies (after Encounters with Nisbet, Brooks-Crew, Gelmi, Yussof Mah and Lau). Oil on canvas, 152.5cm x 91.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Fig. 3: Detail of Excavation (after Encounters with Mah, Nisbet and Brooks-Crew). Oil on canvas, 152.5cm x 91.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Minimaps were also used to allude that which is beyond the frame or perspective of the painting. For example, figs. 4 and 5 show a minimap in the corner of the painting that plots the streets in front of the painting’s central character, representing them from a birds-eye view to mark potential opportunities or dangers a character (and a viewer) cannot observe from looking at the main, diegetic composition of the painting. Fig. 4: Campfire Valley. Oil on board, 184cm x 205.5cm (multiple panels). Harrison Waed See, 2021. Fig. 5: Detail of Campfire Valley showing minimap. It was by exploring HUD elements that I began to experiment with integrating dialogue portraits (or character portraits). Although not strictly a HUD element, dialogue portraits typically appear in videogames next to dialogue text and feature a close-up view of a character as they speak (see Final Fantasy III, 1990). Still used as a trope in contemporary videogames to great effect (see Disco Elysium, 2019), these portraits were used in older videogames to deal with the graphical limitations of pixels—allowing a higher-fidelity rendition of faces and facial expressions that were impossible to show in the much smaller and therefore fewer pixels of a diegetic videogame character. Translating dialogue portraits into paintings meant including close-up details of something or someone too small in the painting to convey otherwise. Like my use of HUD elements, details in these portraits often encourage extensions, reinterpretations, and contradictions of who or what they are attributed to. A recent and subtle example of this integration can be seen in fig. 6, a work-in-progress that emphasises the stare of a small bird otherwise unassumingly perched on a branch. Fig. 6: The Watchers. Oil on board, 50.5cm x 40.5cm. Harrison Waed See, 2025. Aggregate Figures Observing the abrupt difference between the fidelity and aesthetics of in-game characters and their respective dialogue portraits inspired my exploration of what I term ‘aggregate figures’. This approach to figuration was inspired by witnessing how videogames evolved from pixel sprites to fully rendered three-dimensional models, and back again. Being born in 1990, I observed firsthand how developers for 8-bit and 16-bit consoles approached graphical limitations. While still very well-considered, these videogames lacked the pixel-counts required to achieve realism for in-game characters, hence the need for dialogue portraits; instead, representations were symbolic rather than naturalistic. However, a character’s appearance was fragmented across a range of visual languages: beyond in-game pixel sprites, the same character was rendered differently (by different artists) across a videogame’s cover art, promotional media, and toys, as well as in the game during cinematic cutscenes. Similarly, the advent of three-dimensional games on 32-bit consoles had its own sets of limitations. Developers opted to use alternative character models of varying fidelities for different parts of a game. For example, the character ‘Cloud Strife’ (see Final Fantasy VII, 1997), appears significantly different during combat, exploration, and cutscenes. What inspired me the most was the dialogue that forms between a character’s alternative renditions, often aesthetically mismatched with incompatible details, as well as how a character is reiterated between naturalistic and symbolic while still remaining both canonical and recognisable. The notion of aggregate figures is explored in my paintings by fragmenting the same figures across a diverse range of forms—both within the same painting and across a series (fig. 7). I often change small details so that characters have to be pieced together across multiple, incomplete (and incompatible) renditions. As I explored this integration further, I observed how videogame aesthetics are not strictly linear: for example, how the stylistic nature of pixel sprites is extended through more sophisticated animations and higher pixel counts (see Hyper Light Drifter, 2016), or the uncanniness of low-polygon models is intentionally utilised to affect unease (see Paratopic, 2018). I also observed how the fidelity of videogame characters increased across sequels, remasters, or remakes (see Final Fantasy VII: Remake, 2020)—or conversely, how fidelity regressed through demakes (see Bloodborne PSX, 2022). If a videogame character’s aesthetic is unresolved, and not tied to its chronology, then my painted figures do not need to be tied to their context. In other words, I moved away from the convention of increased scale, contrast, chroma, and detail typically used to emphasise a foreground figure, and the inverse used to deemphasise a figure in the background. Taking this a step further, I swapped typically naturalistic figures for typically symbolic icons, and vice versa (fig. 8); all of which created new opportunities to explore a pluralistic approach to painted storytelling. Fig. 7: Details of blue adventurer from series of paintings Far-Away Island. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Fig. 8: Details of blue adventurer next to icon from series of paintings Far-Away Island. Harrison Waed See, 2022. Shifting Conceptions As I continue to translate videogame tropes, specifically, the notion of replayability, I experimented with prints in 2024 (fig. 9), creating a digital composite image from photographs of a series of paintings; together, these prints form a triptych with each featuring minor variations (fig. 10). In 2025, I am exploring variations in painted triptychs that I conceive as a pluralism of replays of the same gameworld marked by alternative choices, and thus alternative outcomes. In this way, the experience of painting is conceived as playing through the potentialities within a landscape, while compositions are conceived as screenshots of a paused videogame waiting to be resumed. For me, embracing the ‘uneven fit’ between painting and videogames continues to prompt improvisation in the studio, and by outlining my experiences, I encourage others to explore their own studio translations. Fig. 9: Valley of Coasts and Beasts. Digital image. Harrison Waed See, 2024. Fig. 10: Valley of Coasts and Beasts. Fabric ink, silk screen print, and archival digital print on synthetic fibre (380 gsm), 138cm, x 103cm (each). Harrison Waed See, 2024–2025. References Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. WHERE IS WHERE? [MISSÄ ON MISSÄ?] Video installation, 6-channel projected High Definition installation with 8-channel sound; 53 min. 43 sec. France, Jeu de Paume, 2008. . Bal, Mieke. “Mektoub: When Art Meets History, Philosophy, and Linguistics.” Case Studies in Interdisciplinary Research, eds. Allen F Repko et al. Sage, 2013. 91–122. . Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. ‌‌Bhabha, Homi K. “Interview with Homi Bhabha: The Third Space.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, by Johnathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207–21. Bloodborne PSX. Dir. b0tster (Lilith Walther) and Corwyn Prichard. Videogame, Windows. LWMedia. Bolt, Barbara. “The Magic Is in the Handling.” Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry. 2nd ed. Eds. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt I.B. Tauris, 2010. 28–34. Bond, Anthony. “Introduction.” The Australian Bicentennial Perspecta, eds. Anthony Bond and Victoria Lynn. Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1987. 4–7. . ‌Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W Smith. London: Continuum, 1981. ———. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press, 1984. ———. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Disco Elysium. Dir. Robert Kurvitz. Videogame, Windows. ZA/UM, 2019. Emerson, Caryl. “Keeping the Self Intact during the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin.” New Literary History 27.1 (1996): 107–26. Final Fantasy III. Dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi. Videogame, Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Square, 1990. Final Fantasy VII. Dir. Yoshinori Kitase. Videogame, Sony Playstation. Square, 1990. Final Fantasy VII: Remake. Dir. Tetsuya Nomura, Naoki Hamaguchi, and Motomu Toriyama. Videogame, Sony Playstation 4. Square, 2020. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. U of Michigan P, 1997. . ‌Gray, Carol, and Julian Malins. Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Ashgate, 2004. Hyper Light Drifter. Dir. Alx Preston, Beau Blyth, Teddy Dief, and Casey Hunt. Videogame, Windows. Heart-Machine, 2016. Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa. Ways of Following: Art, Materiality, Collaboration. Open Humanities Press, 2018. . Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Duke UP, 2017. . ‌Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Cultural Translation, Cosmopolitanism and the Void.” Translation Studies 4.1 (2011): 1–20. . Paratopic. Dir. Jessica Harvey. Videogame, Windows. Arbitrary Metric, 2018. Hemraj, Shaif. “Defining Art Styles in Games and Their Influence on Creative Expression.” Press Start 10.1 (2024). . See, Harrison Waed. Far-Away Island. Exhibition. Western Australia: Spectrum Project Space (ECU Galleries), 2022. See, Harrison Waed. "Analogising Art Practice as Gameplay: A Dialogic Integration of Videogames as a Pluralistic Approach to Painting." Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal 10.1 (2026): 74–105. . See, Harrison Waed, and Patricia Amorim. "Two Approaches to Cross-Cultural Exchange through Shared Arts Practice." Journal of Arts & Communities 16.1 (2026): 57–81. . Shen Zhou [沈周]. 廬山高 [Lofty Mount Lu]. Ink and colours on paper scroll; 193.8cm x 98.1cm. Taiwan: Taipei Palace Museum, c. 1467. . Szymański, Michał. “Computer Games in Art History. Traditional Architecture and Painting Presented in Virtual Reality.” E-Methodology 5.5 (2019): 84–9. .

Designing marketing for Western Australia, I source photos of red earth, select Pantone colours from my digital palette and manipulate Beziér curves to create beautiful visuals. My hands are confined to keyboard and mouse, fingertips clicking smooth plastic keys, crafting perfect representations of Country I’ve never walked on. This process of design represents places through pixel and vector rather than experiencing the crunch of dry earth underfoot, the smell of eucalyptus after rain, or the feeling of wet soil sticking to your skin. This experience reflects broader patterns across design education. In studios across Western Australia, students navigate user interfaces to develop fluency with digital design tools. These experiences build digital literacies essential for contemporary practice that are heavily emphasised in Australian Curriculum (ACARA), yet they only represent one dimension of design knowledge. Material experiences, on the other hand, offer irreplaceable ways of knowing and sensing the world. When I work Clay with Noongar Country, my hands press firmly into earth, feeling the resistance, moisture, and responsiveness of matter that connects me directly to this place. Current secondary design education often overlooks this embodied dimension of material experience, moving quickly from concept to digital visualisation without developing the sensory knowledge that emerges from direct material engagement. This gap matters, as human-caused ecological decline is accelerating (United Nations) and education needs to cultivate designers capable of sensing and responding to a changing climate. Pedagogy that prioritises digital tools that simulate rather than engage with the world risks further distancing young people from natural worlds, while material experiences reconnect humans and environments and support development of much needed ecological awareness. By situating learning within specific places and thinking with materials and the complex stories they carry, education can nurture greater capacity for noticing and living well with damaged landscapes (Tsing). This article emerges from creative research into relational design pedagogy, situated in Boorloo (Perth) in the southwest corner of Western Australia. Drawing from posthuman theories, design is positioned within complex interconnected networks of humans, materials, environments, ideas, and more-than-human actors (Barad; Latour). To engage with these relationships, a practice-led methodology guides my working with Clay to design and prototype vessels for improving water retention in soils. This research examines how deeper understandings of materials embodied in practice transform people-place relations and can inform learning to design sustainable futures. Central to this research is examining how relations of care and responsibility emerge through collaborations with Clay and Country. Australian landscape is Aboriginal and storied, and Boorloo (Perth) carries complex histories of Noongar knowledge and colonial disruption, alongside ecological degradation. Situating my design practice here involves weaving together the layered Stories of Clay that unfold in these unceded lands of the Noongar nations. This highlights Clay bodies as living archives that can teach how to sense moisture, temperature, and seasonal changes that are shifting with ecological imbalance. In this region, the warming climate has triggered intense bushfires and record-breaking dry spells where mature trees are dying off en masse, due to lack of soil moisture (Fowler and Ruthrof). Endemic species are becoming extinct at alarming rates (IUCN; TERN Australia), and rainfall is declining here faster than anywhere else in Australia (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology 8). Designers cannot ignore this accelerating deterioration, and Design Education is called upon to transform human-centred pedagogy with learning experiences that cultivate relations of repair and regeneration. Developing relational design pedagogy starts with recognising that Indigenous cultures have conceptualised the world in relational ways for a very long time (Escobar; Mignolo). In Boorloo (Perth) this means learning from the traditional owners here, the Wadjuk Noongar peoples, and their ongoing connection to Country. First Nations in Australia have experienced genocide, dispossession, and systematic oppression under settler colonialism (Ryan et al.; Yokai). Decolonial approaches are essential for honouring the Indigenous wisdoms that endure in Western Australia. Noongar spirituality embodies reciprocal relationships with Country, reflected in stories of the Waagal, the creation serpent, who maintains all fresh water sources and remains present throughout landscapes (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council). This worldview regards Country as living kin, teaching that human wellbeing and the health of Country are inseparable (Wooltorton et al.). Contemporary design education can respectfully learn from these perspectives and nurture similar attentiveness through situated learning with materials and environments. Ecological awareness emerges through learning experiences in collaboration with materials like Clay, whose stories reveal entangled histories and potential futures across time and place. The Story of Clay in Western Australia The Story of Clay in Western Australia is filled with complex histories spanning distinct periods and changing worldviews. Following these stories reveals geological, cultural, ecological, and spiritual threads that weave together material-relational understandings. One significant strand involves Clay’s central role in the production of building and construction materials. Red bricks produced from Clays in Boorloo (Perth) feature in architecture styles that evolved from the Federation era in 1901 (Apperly, Irving, and Reynolds). In the late nineteenth century, colonial settlers discovered Clay deposits along Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River), the river that cuts through the city, and significant brickworks were established on lands with which Noongar people had maintained relationships for millennia. Clay and ochre have always been important to Wadjuk Noongar people, with physical, spiritual, social, and ceremonial uses for Clays in this region (Museum of Perth par. 2). This period represents relations with Clay as a raw material that shapes built environments, yet cannot be separated from the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Country. Students need to understand that materials carry these histories of extraction, displacement and ecological impact, that designers cannot ignore. Another essential thread in this narrative is how Clay bodies have been shaped by the geography where this story unfolds. Most of Boorloo (Perth) is built on the Swan Coastal Plain, where flat expanses of sandy soils stretch westwards to Gabee Warden Karanup (Indian Ocean). Along the entire eastern horizon, the granite ridge and steep hills of KattaMorda (Darling Range) rise abruptly, forming a constant presence overlooking the city and running parallel to the coast for over 320 km. This escarpment marks the edge of Yilgarn Craton, an ancient continental bedrock where the earth holds stories spanning 4 billion years. Important to this story is how this unique landscape creates conditions for water to weather granite over long periods of time and deposit minerals downstream to form the distinctive terracotta Clays in the Swan Valley region (fig. 1). Designing with these Clay bodies is engaging with a material shaped by this convergence of deep geological time and active water systems. Fig. 1: KattaMorda (Darling Range) marks the edge of Yilgarn Craton, seen as the brown area on the right in this satellite image taken during the 2021 Copernicus Satellite Mission 2. Adapted from European Space Agency. Water shapes both the Clay deposits in Boorloo (Perth) and human relationships to this place, connecting Noongar ways of living with colonial settlement patterns along the same river systems. Rivers are rich sites for understanding Clay and offer multiple dimensions of place as geographic features, sites of cultural significance, spaces for embodied learning, and holders of stories (Somerville). Derbarl Yerrigan (Swan River) is an animating force in Boorloo (Perth), nourishing wetland habitats and sustaining life in this uniquely biodiverse region (Hopper and Gioia). Waters flow through inland areas, then emerge from KattaMorda (Darling Range), where they slow and form the rich soils of the Swan Valley. This fertile region has sustained Indigenous cultures for millennia and later became Western Australia’s oldest wine region and a major source of agricultural produce and construction Clay. It’s here, 35 km northeast of Boorloo (Perth), where waterways converge and we meet the main character in this story, a Clay body referred to as Walyunga Clay (fig. 2). Fig. 2: Walyunga Clay’s distinctive terracotta-red colour comes from deep weathering of the Archaean rock of KattaMorda (Darling Scarp) (Anand and Paine). Photographs by author. Collaborating with Walyunga Clay brings awareness of the tensions in Noongar Country from competing interests of mining, industry, tourism, environmental activism, and Indigenous rights. This Clay body emerges on the edges of Walyunga National Park, a protected area in the Swan Valley, not far from Walyunga Pool, a Wadjuk Noongar meeting place and campground (Hughes-Hallett 66). This area is named for Walyunga or Wayloo, the Noongar name for a small kangaroo, or place of woylie, referring to the brush-tailed bettong (Bettongia penicillata) once endemic here, but now critically endangered (WA Museum). This popular recreational area also hosts the Avon Descent, an annual 2-day white-water event that brings many visitors to the park. Less than a kilometre away, Clay is extracted to manufacture bricks, tiles, and pavers for building and construction. This area was also devastated in 2021 by a wild bushfire that burned for six days, destroying 10,900 hectares, 86 houses, and causing immeasurable impact on animal kin and wildlife communities. An evolving relationship with Walyunga Country provides the primary setting for this story that investigates place-responsive design, and establishes the foundation for the next chapter of this story. Practices for Sensing Walyunga Thinking with Walyunga Clay emerges through this Story of Clay and situated practices that engage slowing down, noticing, and sensing with Walyunga Country. These methods are influenced by Australian Indigenous concepts of deep listening that vary in different landscapes throughout Australia (Yunkaporta). In the southwest of Western Australia this is explained by Noongar Elder Noel Nannup as dwoort, which involves listening to place over extended periods to develop awareness of seasonal patterns. Learning with Walyunga Country since 2021 has deepened my love for this place, but also attuned my senses to the slow material rhythms here. Sustained presence with Walyunga Country develops my capacity for sensing how subtle seasonal changes affect soil conditions, but also grows my understanding of how materials and places affect and teach humans. Each visit with Walyunga starts with watercolour painting to focus my mind and to pay attention to the changing colours of the season. This activity is used in Visual Arts Education to teach tacit knowledge (Polanyi) through sustained observation and for developing perceptual skills (Edwards). This emphasis on noticing scaffolds learning to see what is actually in front of you, rather than relying on symbolic, preconceived, or imagined ideas. When sensing with Walyunga, I mix the colours of each season, not what I imagine a painting of this place should look like. Important in this activity is not the actual painting itself, but rather how this method encourages slowing down and becoming more attuned. Rather than creating pictorial representations through distanced observation, similar to digital design methods, in this sensing activity, paints are mixed and applied in repeating patterns of brushstrokes. The width and length of each stroke varies between visits, determined by the material conditions such as the brush dimensions, water quality, paper absorbency, wind, rain, temperature, light, and shadows. During the Noongar season of Djeran (Autumn), water spills on the paper and I pause and notice the waters of Gogulyar Bilya (Avon River) flowing with Wooroloo Brook (fig. 3). A visit with Djilba (Spring), and the marks on the paper transform into shadows of tiny flying insects that hover above, then four weeks later in Kambarang (second Spring) Walyunga is exploding with the bright colours of Paterson’s curse, a declared weed in local farming areas (fig. 4). It is this sustained looking and sensing with Walyunga Country that reveals ecological relationships that remain invisible in screen-based design education. Fig. 3: In April, the season of Djeran (Autumn) brings rain to fill the pools. Photographs by author. Fig. 4: In October, the season of Kambarang (second Spring) brings warmer weather, wildflowers, and weeds. Photographs by author. The process of sensing materials and places with slow careful attention differs from learning to design with semiotics and symbolic representation, as this relies on culturally learned interpretations, rather than learning from direct experience. When design education heavily emphasises semiotic analysis, conceptual thinking about meanings often overshadows embodied knowledge of how materials respond. This leaves designers fluent in meaning-making and effective communicators of messages to audiences, but disconnected from physical reality. These skills are useful for teaching marketing design with an economic purpose, but they no longer serve a world in climate crisis, where reciprocal relations are urgently needed for teaching design for repair and regeneration. In this context, developing pedagogies of listening becomes essential for sensing climate and understanding what materials like Clay can teach about ecological relationships. Making with Walyunga Clay and Country Making with Walyunga Clay emerges through sensing practices and making materials for designing functional vessels. Following the Story of Clay in Western Australia led me to a local brick manufacturer, Midland Brick, who work with Clay bodies in the Swan Valley region. I gathered a range of Clay soils from their Walyunga/Bullsbrook North site to respectfully work with existing disturbance and minimise impact on fragile ecosystems, whilst still engaging with Noongar Country. Making with Walyunga Clay involves a process of slaking, where dried earth is mixed with water to form a Clay that can be sculpted into vessels. These situated relational design practices help me better understand the material qualities of Walyunga Clay, whilst building relations of care and reciprocity with Noongar Country. Relational design practices require extended temporal engagement with the changing states of Clay. During the slaking process, dried soils are added to water to awaken their plasticity, then the mixture is left to settle overnight so the Clay suspension can separate (fig. 5). Excess water is then carefully removed, and the mixture is filtered through fabric to release water for another two days. When the Clay achieves the perfect workability for shaping into forms, I start rolling the material into balls then engage an ancient coiling technique found across cultures worldwide. The Clay that emerged was grainy and textural compared to commercially bought materials, as it was shaped by hand-making and the other materials this Clay has gathered over time. This challenges the pursuit of refined perfect materials for human use, instead revealing the richness of engaging with interdependent more-than-human communities. Yet this slaking process was only the beginning of an even more intimate temporal relationship with Walyunga Clay. Fig. 5: Slaking soils and hand-building Walyunga Clay vessels with Noongar Country. Photographs by author. The hand-building process that followed demanded even deeper temporal commitment. Each vessel required daily monitoring and checking of moisture levels, adjusting covers and positioning according to climatic conditions, where I learn to respond to Clay’s pace of drying over days and sometimes weeks. This intimate attention to the changing needs of materials contrasts sharply with conventional learning in Western Australian secondary schools, where students work with manufactured Clays for short periods and teachers are left to manage the crucial drying process. This misses the opportunity for experiencing the leatherhard stage, that perfect moment when Clay has dried enough to be firm and rigid but is still pliable and can be smoothed, polished and joined. At this stage the vessel becomes incredibly responsive, allowing sgraffitto techniques and cutting of precise holes in walls without compromising structural integrity. Walyunga Clay’s creamy malleability at leatherhard stage reveals possibilities impossible at any other moisture level. Practices of following (Kontturi) were developed through this patient attention to material transformations. Reciprocal relationships emerged where Walyunga Clay became teacher and collaborator, nurturing embodied knowledge through relations of care. This engagement is influenced by Indigenous understandings of time and Haraway’s notion of a thick present (1), where the storied histories embedded in Clay continue to shape present moments, while opening future possibilities. Walyunga Clay demonstrates agency by shrinking and cracking when drying too fast, becoming more plastic when wet, and actively repelling conventional joining techniques. Standard score and slip methods fail because this Clay body resists water mixtures, requiring instead the physical merging of parts with pressing and blending until they become unified. Without this intimate integration, joints separate during drying, revealing Clay’s resistance. Working with Walyunga Clay reveals behaviours such as these that are impossible to understand through observation alone. The iron-rich composition of Walyunga Clay was formed over geological time and carries stories of ancient water flows and seasonal flooding that shaped this landscape. This taught me about the intimate relationship between Clay and water cycles, showing how material properties remain inseparable from climatic conditions across multiple timescales. Walyunga Clay’s selective absorption patterns and temperamental drying behaviours demand patient attention and responsive design choices. This led me to design compact vessels with solid walls that worked with rather than against these material agencies. Such temporally-layered engagement demonstrates pedagogical approaches are needed to attune students with specific places and materials with learning that embodies climate relationships essential for regenerative design. Relational Design Pedagogy with Noongar Country Situating design practice through place-based material experiences can transform design education from screen-based digital manipulation to embodied environmental literacy. Working with Walyunga Clay reveals how materials continue to shape present understandings whilst creating future possibilities and developing climate awareness, impossible to achieve through digital learning alone. Sensing practices of watercolour painting with Noongar Country and deeper material engagement foster intimate relationships where materials guide and inform the learning process. This transforms conceptual knowledge into embodied understanding of how climate affects matter and how matter responds across multiple timescales. Following the Story of Clay in Western Australia demonstrates how situating design within multi-layered narratives develops relational thinking with Noongar Country. This approach reveals layered histories, spanning Indigenous knowledge systems, colonial extraction, and ecological relationships, while cultivating the temporal awareness essential for climate-responsive practice. Such situated learning moves beyond conventional sustainability approaches and cradle-to-cradle design methods (McDonough and Braungart) to develop forms of environmental literacy that emerge only through direct and sustained engagement with place. Rather than emphasising rapid iteration and digital fluency, this pedagogical approach enables students to read material behaviours as climate indicators, developing the skills required for addressing ecological challenges through design. The contrast between designing perfect digital representations of Country I’ve never walked with and feeling deep time and material agency through my hands pressed into Walyunga Clay reveals what design education urgently needs. Digital technologies have expanded creative possibilities, but situated engagement with materials remains an irreplaceable form of experiential knowledge. As climate challenges intensify, design pedagogy must cultivate designers capable of sensing environmental relationships through material experiences with place, rather than relying on digital technologies. Situating design practice offers pathways for this transformation, developing the relational understanding necessary for regenerative design futures centred on caring with Country. References ACARA. "Digital Literacy in the New Australian Curriculum." Australian Curriculum (2026). . Anand, Ravinder Raj, and Mark Paine. "Regolith Geology of the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia: Implications for Exploration." Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 49.1 (2002): 3–162. . Apperly, Richard, Robert Irving, and Peter L. Reynolds. A Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture: Styles and Terms from 1788 to the Present. 3rd ed. Angus & Robertson, 1994. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology. State of the Climate 2024. CSIRO, 2024. . Edwards, Betty. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. 2nd ed. Jeremy P. Tarcher / Putnam, 1999. Escobar, Arturo. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke UP, 2018. European Space Agency. “Earth from Space: Perth, Australia.” 2021. . Fowler, William, and Katinka Ruthrof. "The 2024 Vegetation Die-Off in the Southwest." Bushland News 130 (2024): 3–5. . Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Hopper, Stephen D., and Paul Gioia. "The Southwest Australian Floristic Region: Evolution and Conservation of a Global Hot Spot of Biodiversity." Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 35.1 (2004): 623–50. Hughes‐Hallett, Debra. Indigenous History of the Swan and Canning Rivers. Swan River Trust, 2010. . IUCN. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. 2026. . Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa. Ways of Following. Open Humanities Press, 2018. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press, 2002. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke UP, 2011. Museum of Perth. "Dyeedyallalup." . Nannup, Noel. "Ni! Means Listen: Uncle Noel Nannup." Ngaluk Waangkiny: Stories of Resilience, ed. Phil Walleystack. Ep. 8. Community Arts Network, City of Perth, and Australian Broadcasting Commission, 2022. . Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. 2nd ed. U of Chicago P, 2009. Ryan, Lyndall, et al. Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788-1930. University of Newcastle, 2024. . Somerville, Margaret. Water in a Dry Land: Place-Learning through Art and Story. Routledge, 2013. South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council. "Spirituality.” Kaartdijin Noongar – Noongar Knowledge, 2023. . TERN Australia. Australia’s Threatened Species Index – 2025 Update. . Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025. 2025. . WA Museum. "Woylie." 2023. . Wooltorton, Sandra, et al. "Sharing a Place-Based Indigenous Methodology and Learnings." Environmental Education Research 26.7 (2020): 917–34. YOKAI Healing Our Spirit (West Australian Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation) and Bringing Them Home, WA Inc., producers. Genocide in the Wildflower State. Dir. Frank Rijavec. Ronin Films, 2024. Yunkaporta, Tyson. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. The Text Publishing Company, 2023.

Introduction Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become one of the defining cultural technologies of the 2020s, transforming not only how content is produced but also how creativity itself is imagined. From text generation to image synthesis, GenAI blurs distinctions between professional and amateur practice, art and automation, originality and imitation. These shifts reach far beyond the studio or agency: they unsettle cultural hierarchies, redistribute expertise, and reconfigure what it means to author or evaluate creative work with scholars and practitioners highlighting both GenAI’s disruptive and enabling potential (Amankwah-Amoah et al.; Coffin; Hartmann et al.; Matthews et al.). As such, GenAI sits squarely at the intersection of technology and culture, making it vital to examine how creative practitioners experience and negotiate its affordances. These questions mirror broader cultural discussions about automation, expertise, aesthetics, and creativity in digital media, situating our research within contemporary debates about creativity in an algorithmic age. This article explores those negotiations through a collaborative autoethnography (Chang) in which creative professionals who are also educators worked with GenAI tools to develop an advertising campaign from concept to final artefact. By grounding our analysis in lived experience, we examine not only what GenAI can produce, but how it alters the creative process. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s systems model of creativity and Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital, we situate our reflections within a wider theoretical conversation about expertise, taste, and technological mediation. These frameworks allow us to interrogate how GenAI participation affects the balance between human judgment and machine generation or between creative flow and algorithmic patterning. In doing so, we contribute to broader debates on the cultural implications of GenAI by identifying how expert practitioners sustain, redefine, and sometimes resist aesthetic standards in an era of algorithmic co-creation. The Positive Case for GenAI in Creative Practice The rapid rise of GenAI has intensified debates about its role in creative practice, particularly in creative industries where efficiency, cost-saving, and innovation are central (Cui et al.; Hartmann et al.; Matthews et al.). The issue is no longer simply whether GenAI is useful but how it reshapes the very conditions of creativity. By automating routine tasks, the technology frees practitioners to focus on more imaginative and rewarding work. As Amankwah-Amoah et al. highlight, GenAI’s transformative potential can produce “compelling” content without the burden of extensive “manual research and editing” (2), saving creative professionals time and energy that can be repurposed to more invigorating and empowering activities. Yet, as Csikszentmihalyi’s model suggests, creativity emerges from the dynamic interaction between domain (cultural knowledge), field (gatekeepers and experts), and individual (the creator). When GenAI intervenes in this system, it can rebalance these forces, enabling rapid idea generation but also introducing algorithmic biases that affect the domain of possible outcomes (Atkinson and Baker), or expectations that one can demand more for less (Matthews et al.). This theoretical perspective stresses that what feels like creative freedom can also be a reconfiguration of control. In the debates supporting GenAI, Hettrich et al. suggest that the technology can challenge human creators to think beyond the obvious by offering alternative directions that spark the creative imagination in ways they might not reach alone. Its adoption, then, is not merely a matter of convenience but a means of expanding creative possibility. What debates advocating for GenAI use emphasise is the fact that its use does not sideline the human creator. Instead, GenAI reshapes their role: Osadchaya et al. underline its function as collaborator and catalyst, enabling creatives to overcome the ‘tyranny of the blank page’, while Cui et al. highlight how it sparks novel ideas and accelerates responses to creative briefs. These perspectives make clear that GenAI should not be viewed as a competitor to human creativity but as a partner that expands its possibilities, challenging practitioners to reimagine both the process and the product of creative work. From a systems perspective, these collaborations demonstrate how GenAI alters what Csikszentmihalyi describes as a flow state: the absorption and momentum characteristic of deep creative engagement by accelerating iteration cycles and reframing what counts as exploration. Furthermore, audiences are also becoming less apprehensive about AI-generated content, with some studies showing they find AI images equally persuasive, especially in areas such as advertising and brand communication (Hartmann et al.). This suggests that combining GenAI with human expertise can enhance both the creative potential of the work and its acceptance by audiences. The Negative Case for GenAI in Creative Practice Despite GenAI’s growing value in creative processes, anxieties remain that it could displace professionals and dilute the aesthetic and quality standards traditionally associated with creative work that is exclusively human-made (Amankwah-Amoah et al.; Coffin). Scholars such as Runco contend that GenAI produces only “pseudo-creativity” (1), outputs that may appear effective but lack the contextual grounding and cultural depth of human innovation. Creative professionals echo this scepticism, observing that while AI can generate polished drafts, the raw outputs often feel “off” (Matthews et al. 15) or are “formulaic” outputs that undermine the intrinsic drive for experimentation and play that defines creative practice (Runco 1). These critiques highlight a deeper concern that, as GenAI becomes more widely adopted, the benchmarks by which creativity is judged may be lowered or distorted. Furthermore, from a Bourdieusian lens, the tension between technology and expertise reflects a struggle over cultural capital and taste: if expertise is what legitimises creativity, then the automation of creative labour threatens to redistribute symbolic power toward technological systems. The democratisation of generative tools, then, adds another layer of complexity. With platforms like DALL·E and Midjourney enabling anyone to produce seemingly professional content, the boundaries of what counts as valuable creativity risk becoming blurred (Ahmed and Ali; Chamakiotis and Panteli; Matthews et al.). Studies point to both the promise and the peril of this accessibility. Namely, GenAI lowers barriers to participation, but in doing so, it may also flood cultural spaces with superficial, poorly developed, distorted work (Ahmed and Ali), referred to openly as ‘AI slop’ (Smith and Southerton). The degradation of creative content could be inevitable because, as Chamakiotis and Panteli argue, GenAI privileges speed and quantity over originality and finesse. In professional settings, this tension becomes evident as GenAI enables less experienced practitioners to produce more polished work, but excessive dependence on the technology may hinder the growth of critical thinking and the refinement of creative skills (Hettrich et al.). Taken together, these dynamics raise important questions about how to preserve aesthetic standards and creative depth in an era where content creation is increasingly democratised. Accordingly, expertise remains crucial. Creativity has long been judged not only by novelty but also by peer recognition, audience reception, or what Csikszentmihalyi refers to as gatekeepers. Experts are well-placed to uphold aesthetic and quality standards because they understand the rules and practices that govern their discipline. As Bourdieu argued, those with cultural competence are deemed the most versed in encoding value in creative work and by extension maintain “explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation” (2). Previous studies highlight this point, showing that while professionals view GenAI as helpful for generating ideas or producing early drafts, they stress that only a specialist can refine those outputs into work that is truly original and meaningful (DiStefano et al.; Matthews et al.). In this sense, the value of expertise lies not in resisting technology but in knowing how to use it effectively, drawing out its benefits while guarding against formulaic or tone-deaf outcomes, especially given the copyright infringement concerns that accompany GenAI-produced work. As scholars have contended, copyright conflict in creative industries stems from GenAI models using vast amounts of protected works as training data without permission (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson). Supporters claim this ‘fair training’ is transformative, non-expressive, and socially beneficial (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson), while critics see it as misappropriation that enables derivative, market-harming outputs (Lucchi; Torrance and Tomlinson). Given the loose legal restrictions that currently exist, it falls, in part, to creative experts to operate GenAI technology cautiously to prevent the misuse and exploitation of the creative work of others. Approaching the Research Our research set out to investigate how we, as experts in visual communication, experience GenAI. We are not only creative professionals with years of experience in our respective industries, but also academics responsible for teaching undergraduates the skills required for effective visual communication, positioning us as both practitioners and gatekeepers of disciplinary standards. As part of our research, we aimed to understand not only the functional opportunities and challenges presented by these technologies, but also the evaluative judgments that can be made about AI-generated content. We operationalised this inquiry through a collaborative autoethnography (Chang) anchored to a shared industry-style task. Using a single creative brief for a new energy drink launch (the new energy drink was presented as the first on the market to use ingredients sourced from the Amazon), we asked each practitioner–researcher to develop an end-to-end brand identity using GenAI tools (namely those offered by OpenAI, particularly DALL·E and ChatGPT-5) as the primary means of production—covering naming, logo, optional mascot, can packaging, a bus-shelter poster, and (optionally) a 15–20s spot. The brief served both as the task environment and as the evaluation frame against which creative adequacy was judged. Participants (MG, JM, AA, DF, AD) worked independently while “thinking aloud”, screen-recording their sessions, and retaining prompt logs, intermediate iterations, and exported artefacts; AN oversaw the process and methodological consistency. Our protocol was AI-first: participants attempted to complete all deliverables with GenAI; where they departed from this (e.g., corrective manual refinements), those moments were explicitly noted and treated as analytical data about breakdowns and boundary conditions. We then convened an artefact-led focus group to review outputs against the brief, surface pain points, and identify what worked and what did not from the vantage point of expert practice and pedagogy. Analytically, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke) across three data streams—process recordings and transcripts, prompt/iteration logs, and the group discussion—linking lived experience to evaluative judgements about creativity and quality. Accordingly, operating from an experiential perspective, we were able to inductively examine both the functional affordances (speed, exploration, iteration) and frictions (fidelity loss, aesthetic convergence, control over detail) of GenAI, and to clarify how expert judgment mediates whether machine-assisted work meets, falls short of, or redefines professional standards. Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s model, we viewed each participant’s engagement with AI as an interaction between personal expertise (individual), the creative brief and aesthetic conventions (domain), and peer evaluation within our group (field). This structure helped ensure our analysis remained theoretically grounded, linking micro-level reflections to broader cultural questions of authorship, taste, and accountability. Inspired Ideation Our experiences of working with GenAI revealed just how valuable the technology was for brainstorming and exploration. We consistently reflected on how the act of engaging with ChatGPT-5 helped us move from a myriad of options and creative blocks into creative momentum, often describing the experience as both liberating and stimulating. One recurring idea was the way the GenAI enabled them to overcome the inertia of starting out. For instance, AA noted that she was able to become “unstuck” by having a GenAI partner to “bounce ideas off”, a sentiment echoed by others who felt the GenAI created an immediate entry point into the creative process. Another shared dimension of experience was the sense of efficiency in narrowing options. AD explained how the GenAI allowed him to test and discard unworkable directions early, giving him confidence to focus on ideas with more potential. DF described a similar advantage, pointing to the “quick iteration” made possible by GenAI and how it could generate multiple text-based possibilities, such as brand names, slogans, or directions. The experience of brainstorming with GenAI was also described as sparking ideas that participants claimed they would not have reached independently. JM, for example, highlighted how a loose brief could be transformed into “high-fidelity renders” that pushed him into new design spaces and kept inspiration flowing. MG similarly explained how the GenAI’s capacity to rapidly canvas and condense research from Amazonian animals to Portuguese vocabulary did not just save him time but opened imaginative avenues that he could then refine into his own creative vision. In these ways, the technology served less as a substitute for human creativity and more as a catalyst, nudging us toward unanticipated directions. Our accounts align closely with scholarship suggesting that GenAI enhances not just efficiency but also imagination by encouraging creators to think beyond conventional pathways (Cui, et al.; Hartmann, et al.; Hettrich, et al., Matthews, et al.). Within Csikszentmihalyi’s terms, GenAI acted as an externalised flow facilitator: it sustained momentum, expanded associative links, and provided immediate feedback loops that simulated collaborative ideation. In this sense, our experiences demonstrate that brainstorming with AI is not merely a functional shortcut but a creative encounter in its own right, one that reshapes how ideas emerge and evolve. Familiarity with the Tools A second moment of experience that emerged strongly from the reflections concerned the sense that OpenAI tools carried a “memory” of their users and often defaulted to preconceived understandings of our styles and domains. We described this as a double-edged sword. On one hand, the technology’s ability to learn our tendencies meant interactions could feel more tailored and efficient. Yet, on the other hand, this personalisation sometimes narrowed the scope of exploration, creating outputs that were less surprising or more rigid than had been hoped. What became clear in these reflections was a tension between the promise of open-ended brainstorming and the reality of a GenAI that appeared to anchor itself in prior patterns of interaction. Several of us explicitly noted how past usage influenced what the GenAI produced. MG explained that over time, his ChatGPT “had learned to work with” him, and because he primarily relied on it for data science tasks, “it knows that I work with academic rigour. It knows that I work with code, so every now and then it would actually spit out Python code at me”. AD echoed this experience, reflecting that since so many of his past prompts had begun with “give me code for”, the GenAI seemed to perceive their relationship as “more analytical, and it’s more, you know, here’s a specific task we’re solving, not so much here’s something we’re exploring”. For him, this meant that had the brief been to create a Python module, “we would have had a better time of it, because we know exactly where the caveats are”. Both accounts underline how the GenAI’s learned behaviour risked funnelling creative processes back into familiar domains. Others in the team extended this idea by considering how memory shaped their overall creative encounters. JM remarked that “it does build that kind of memory for people that have used it”, noting that when “memories [are] turned on, this will colour” the responses. He felt his own lack of frustration with the project stemmed from his long-standing “methodology” of working with the system, which gave him an awareness of its limits and common pathways. DF similarly recalled a moment when the GenAI pulled in “data from a whole other chat” after he began a new conversation and asked about the project, a misapplication that nevertheless highlighted the model’s tendency to overreach by leaning on remembered context. We also spoke about how our strategies for interacting with the GenAI were shaped by these experiences. AD admitted that he sometimes withheld the full brief because “when it has the context, it just jumps the gun”, an approach he recognised as “coloured by other experiences he had with it”. AA likewise wondered if the GenAI had “taken that on board” that she used it mainly for “ideation and refinement”. She found it reliable for brainstorming but observed that it seemed less effective when asked to generate images, almost as though it had learned her preferred use and resisted branching into other tasks. Together, these reflections highlight the ambivalence of experiencing a GenAI that appears to remember and anticipate. While this familiarity seemed to increase efficiency, it also narrowed exploration: a process Bourdieu might describe as the reproduction of habitus within a digital system. The GenAI model effectively learned and reinforced each participant’s preferences, which could reduce the novelty of output. This interaction exemplifies how algorithmic personalisation, though convenient, can, and in some instances did, amplify pre-existing creative dispositions rather than challenge them. Aesthetic Likes and Preferences A further dimension of experience participants reflected on was the aesthetics produced through their engagement with the GenAI tools. Here, the conversation often oscillated between moments of excitement when the GenAI generated something visually striking and frustration when the results felt generic, inconsistent, or resistant to refinement. What was clear across our experiences was that aesthetics mattered deeply to the creative process, and the GenAI’s ability—or inability—to deliver on those expectations shaped how useful we ultimately found it. Fig. 1: Bojo Yaruma final bus stop poster advertisement. On the positive side, some of us frequently described the thrill of seeing loose ideas turned into polished visuals. JM emphasised how rewarding it was to go from “a loose brief” to “fully developed concepts” (see fig. 1), and the way the GenAI could quickly provide “thumbnails of treatments” that opened up design pathways. Similarly, AD praised certain outputs, noting that the GenAI’s renderings were “more solid than a sketch” he could have produced himself, which made it easier to communicate a general direction. Fig. 2: “Onda” can elements. MG also observed improvements over time, recalling that some jellyfish designs he was exploring eventually resembled a “famous motif”, and he appreciated moments where colour palettes and backgrounds felt coherent, such as a “green pattern background” that integrated seamlessly with his chosen mascot (see fig. 2). AA likewise expressed satisfaction when hybridising two GenAI outputs into a logo she liked, describing her final can as “funky” and “quite cool” (see fig. 3). Fig. 3: The Jinx energy drink and advertising mock-ups. For DF, the appeal lay in how the GenAI could apply simple foliage or logos consistently to can mock-ups, making the design process feel fluid and accessible (see fig. 4). Fig. 4: The textured “Jobo” energy drink can. Yet alongside these moments of satisfaction were recurring frustrations. Many of us described the outputs as inconsistent, with the GenAI prone to “losing fidelity” when refining logos, text, or small details. JM struggled with warning labels and wordmarks, where designs would “fall apart”. DF found the GenAI’s typography “rubbish” and overly basic, lamenting the “fat logos” it seemed to prefer despite his desire for thin minimalism. In the end, he hand-designed the typography for his can because it could never get it right (see fig. 5). Fig. 5: DF’s hand-drawn logo design that worked as inspiration. AA critiqued the fonts as “quite boring” and “safe options that don’t stand out”, while MG described the colour palettes as “terrible” and the attempts at clean line work for mascots as “garbage”. AD, who had clear preferences for earthy tones and organic patterns, became frustrated when the GenAI ignored specified instructions, such as completely changing a chosen red or when the can changed style when integrated into advertising assets (see figs. 6 & 7). In Figure 7, it was also clear that the GenAI struggled to develop the basketballer’s hand: a common issue with images constructed by GenAI models, which produce people typical of the uncanny valley (Keyes and Hyland). In short, across these experiences, the sense of creative misalignment was clear. Fig. 6 (left): The final can; Fig. 7 (right): The can losing its design elements. These frustrations align with what scholars have noted about the limits of AI-driven creativity. Rather than producing genuinely novel ideas, generative systems tend to recycle established design conventions embedded in their training data, which gives the work a generic or predictable quality. For us, this meant that while the outputs could appear visually striking at first glance, they often revealed an underlying artifice. What looked like creativity was in fact the GenAI reverting to familiar stylistic tropes, leading to results that felt shallow or mismatched with the more nuanced experimentation and originality we were aiming for (Matthews et al.; Runco). A unifying critique was the perception that the GenAI’s aesthetics leaned toward the generic, evoking a “templated” quality. AD was blunt, saying that “everything looks like it was made in Canva… this is still just another Canva image at the end”, estimating that outputs fell into “90% of the barrel” of common design work rather than the “phenomenal 10%” of originality. AA saw echoes of big brands, such as a logo that looked “way too similar to Nike”, while DF dismissed many GenAI name suggestions as “pretty vanilla” and described typography as basic stock replications. MG wanted to avoid “cliché energy drink” imagery, which he felt often appeared “a bit cheese”, and JM, while more accepting, still admitted that the GenAI “has got its biases, and its training data”, pointing out that much of design is already “versions of the same thing”. These observations can be connected to the broader democratisation of the technology: because GenAI draws on vast pools of mainstream visual references, it inevitably reproduces the dominant aesthetics that circulate most widely (Ahmed and Ali; Chamakiotis and Panteli; Matthews et al.). In this sense, the similarity of outputs is less a flaw in the system than an extension of how design itself functions intertextually, with all creative work borrowing from and echoing prior styles (Baron; Shahariar). To expect GenAI to transcend these paradigms may, therefore, be unrealistic, given that its models are grounded in training data that mimic design and stylistic biases (Atkinson and Barker). What we encountered, then, was not so much a failure of the technology as the exposure of its limitations in pushing beyond conventions that are already deeply embedded in the cultural capital from which it learns. Conclusion Our findings suggest that working with GenAI is not a binary contest between human and machine, but an ongoing negotiation of creative control, aesthetic agency, and cultural value. Across our reflections, three mechanisms of co-creativity emerged: acceleration (AI as a catalyst for ideation and iteration), convergence (AI’s tendency to reproduce dominant aesthetic tropes), and refinement (the human expert’s capacity to critique and reframe AI outputs). Together, these reveal how expertise functions as both a filter and a counterweight, maintaining creative depth while navigating the efficiencies and biases of algorithmic generation. Theoretically, this study extends debates in creative cognition and computational creativity by demonstrating that expert practitioners do not simply adapt to AI but actively curate its affordances within cultural and disciplinary norms. Practically, it shows that GenAI reshapes how creative labour is distributed and valued, demanding new literacies of critique, iteration, and authorship. Culturally, it illuminates how creative work with AI becomes a site where notions of originality, authenticity, and artistic authority are being renegotiated. In this sense, GenAI does not merely assist creativity, it transforms the ecosystem in which creativity occurs. Understanding that transformation requires attention not only to the tools themselves but to the evolving practices, judgments, and aesthetic negotiations through which human expertise continues to matter. 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Mobile Phone Technology and Health Behaviour Change in China Since the early 2010s, the health and fitness market in China has experienced remarkable growth (Krebs and Duncan). Fitness apps have become an important part of this growth, supporting users to exercise, monitor progress, and develop healthier lifestyles (Sibor, Stoller, and Wang). As of 2023, China’s online fitness app market generated almost RMB 800 million (approximately A$169 million) in revenue (Saas). Industry forecasts suggest this market will continue to grow over the next decade, reflecting increasing demand for digital health and fitness services in China (Grand View Research; Market Research Future). This growth highlights the importance of designing fitness apps that support long-term user engagement. However, despite their popularity, fitness apps in China face a notable challenge. Compared with other mobile health (mHealth) apps, they experience lower levels of user stickiness, referring to users’ continued engagement with an app over time (Hu et al.). According to Localytics, 80% of users stop engaging with their fitness apps within just 30 days of downloading them (Localytics). This low retention rate is especially concerning among young Chinese adults, a group that often struggles with body dissatisfaction, insufficient physical activity, and disordered eating behaviours (Hao et al.). These challenges are not only behavioural, but also reflect how individuals experience and relate to their own bodies in everyday life. Consequently, fitness apps do more than guide behaviour; they also shape how users perceive, experience, and engage with their bodies during exercise. It is worth noting that a lack of physical activity and distorted body image perceptions are common among young people in China. The rate of regular physical exercise among Chinese individuals aged 20–69 years was only 18.7% in 2013 (Nie et al.). Liao et al.‘s study demonstrated a high prevalence of eating disorders among young Chinese adults, with 2.5% displaying at-risk eating attitudes. Body dissatisfaction is considered a significant contributing factor to eating disorders (Arigo, Schumacher, and Martin). Continuous exposure to advertising on social media, coupled with pervasive peer pressure, significantly contributes to the cultivation of distorted body image perceptions in China. For example, the notion that a woman's thinness equates to beauty is deeply ingrained in the public's mindset (Xu et al.); however, most young women feel that the BMI index is inaccurate and should indicate a lower value than the normal index (Hao et al.). Current app designs tend to rely heavily on basic tracking functions, social communities, or influencer livestreams. While these features can support initial engagement, they rarely sustain motivation or foster a balanced, long-term healthy lifestyle (Wei et al.; Zhou, Wang, and Tuo). This highlights the need to better understand how fitness apps can support sustained engagement with physical activity beyond short-term motivation. Drawing on case studies and interviews with young Chinese adults, this study explores how gamification strategies can support users’ ongoing engagement with exercise by considering how they experience and interact with their bodies during physical activity. Gamification Gamification, a term coined in 2008, refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (Deterding et al.). Following the definition proposed by Deterding et al., gamification has been widely adopted across commercial and health sectors to encourage behaviour change and improve user engagement and retention. It has become a dominant strategy in mobile health and fitness apps, where game-like rewards and incentives are used to motivate users and sustain healthy habits. Despite its widespread adoption, evidence regarding its effectiveness in supporting sustained engagement with physical activity remains limited (Kumar and Herger). As young adults are generally familiar with game-based systems (Deterding et al.; Zichermann and Cunningham), gamification has the potential to support long-term physical activity. Drawing on insights from twelve young Chinese adults and case studies of existing fitness apps, this study asks: How can gamification strategies be designed to better support sustained engagement with physical activity in Chinese fitness apps? Gamification and Stickiness A key objective of gamification strategies is to improve user “stickiness”, defined here as an app’s ability to encourage users to return regularly and sustain engagement over time rather than discontinue use after initial adoption. In the context of fitness apps, stickiness extends beyond repeated use to encompass continued participation in physical activity. As shown in table 1, Lister et al. conducted a large-scale review of 132 health and fitness apps and found that 67% incorporated at least one gamification element. The most common features were social competition, feedback mechanisms, and digital rewards. Table 1: Descriptive statistics for gamification elements. Measuring rubrics Feature or strategies Num of apps Score Total % Game elements 3.80 of 13 29.23 Self-representation with avatars 68 3D environments 8 Narrative context 8 Feedback from game (before or during) 45 Feedback, reinforcement (after) 76 Leaderboards 43 Ranks of achievements 39 Different levels of play 28 Marketplaces and economies 19 Competition 42 Teams (multi-player modes) 19 Parallel communication systems 64 Time pressure 43 Gamification 2.29 of 6 38.16 Leaderboards 43 Levels of achievement or rank 34 Digital rewards 73 Real word prizes 24 Competitions or challenges 51 Social or peer pressure 78 Note. Summary of Lister et al.'s evaluation of 132 health and fitness apps. The behavioural score (maximum = 13) measures the extent to which an app incorporates health behaviour constructs, including capability, motivation, and opportunity/trigger. The game score (maximum = 13) assesses the use of effective game design principles, while the gamification score (maximum = 6) indicates the number of gamification elements implemented in each app. These findings suggest that gamification is widely incorporated into fitness apps, although the depth and quality of its implementation vary considerably. Lister et al.’s findings align with other empirical studies, identifying social challenges and progress challenges as two common forms of gamification in fitness apps (Aparicio et al.; Aydınlıyurt et al.; Cotton and Patel). Social challenges encourage participation through interaction with other users, including cooperation, competition, or peer support, or shared goals that promote motivation and accountability. Examples include Fitbit and Fitocracy, where users can compete with or support friends and teams. Progress challenges focus on individual progression by encouraging users to complete personally defined fitness tasks or milestones and rewarding their progress. Apps such as MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, and Strava use this approach by tracking users' achievements and providing feedback, badges, or other rewards upon task completion. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson hypothesise a state of flow, in which the level of task difficulty plays a key role in sustaining engagement. In fitness apps, an easy task may involve completing a 5-minute stretching session or achieving a daily step goal that is well within a user's ability, which can become repetitive and lead to boredom if it offers little challenge. In contrast, a difficult task, such as completing a high-intensity workout or reaching an unrealistic weekly exercise target, may exceed a user's current ability and result in frustration or anxiety. When task difficulty is appropriately matched to an individual's skills, users are more likely to experience focus, enjoyment, and immersion. Similarly, Fogg’s Behaviour Model suggests that motivation and behaviour depend partly on an individual's ability to perform a task. Together, these theories suggest that gamified fitness apps should adapt task difficulty to users' changing abilities to better support sustained engagement throughout the fitness journey. However, gamified challenge tasks, ranging from easy to difficult, are more likely to function as behavioural triggers or sources of motivation than to develop users' capabilities. Lister et al. found that the use of health behaviour theory in fitness apps was positively associated with gamification, particularly with motivation, but not with users' capability or opportunity/trigger. This suggests that many gamified fitness apps primarily seek to motivate users while paying less attention to whether they have the skills and confidence to complete the activity. Consequently, gamification may encourage initial participation but fail to support sustained engagement if users' abilities and experiences are not considered over time (Michie, Van Stralen, and West). Designing Embodied Engagement in Fitness Apps This section draws on case studies and interviews conducted in this study to examine how gamified fitness experiences are shaped through users' bodily interactions with tasks and rewards. By bringing these findings together, the analysis identifies aspects of current fitness app design that may be overlooked and offers insights into participants’ lived experiences of exercise. Tasks Need to Consider the User's Ability to Grow Ring Fit Adventure is a popular fitness game developed by Nintendo for the Switch console, widely used across Asia. The game combines role-playing elements with exercise, guiding players through a narrative adventure while requiring physical movements to progress. It primarily relies on progress challenges, where users complete fitness tasks and receive rewards as they advance through levels. Ring Fit Adventure was selected as a case study because it illustrates how gamified tasks are designed in relation to users’ abilities and was frequently discussed by participants during the interviews. Examining this relationship provides a basis for considering how task difficulty supports (or hinders) sustained engagement with physical activity. The following observations draw first on existing analyses of Ring Fit Adventure before being considered alongside participants’ reflections from this study. According to Czerwonka, Alvarez, and McArthur, Ring Fit Adventure provides a useful example of how Flow Theory can be implemented in an exergame. Their analysis also highlights several limitations of the game experience that warrant further consideration. Ring Fit Adventure employs an idealised body image to motivate users. However, it fails to fully accommodate the diverse range of player body types. Players may feel further disappointed by the avatar representation on the screen, perceiving it as misrepresentative. As shown in fig. 1, players encountered difficulties during the setup process, as the game failed to recognise their readiness. Despite standing, their height was not accurately registered by the system. To overcome this issue, players had to resort to lowering the leg strap below their knees to deceive the setup system successfully. Furthermore, the yoga exercises feature an idealised female body shape, and the standardised movements do not accommodate some overweight women, leading to difficulty in performing exercises correctly or causing injuries. This highlights a gap between the designed representation of the body and the user’s lived bodily experience during interaction. Fig. 1: Ring Fit Adventureforces the player to cheat their body. Adapted from Jiang and Tham, "The Thing-Power of Ring Fit Adventure as Embodied Play: Tracing New Materialist Rhetoric across Physical and Cultural Borders." Jiang and Tham conducted a case study on Ring Fit Adventure and noted that one movement should be adaptable to different abilities. Ring Fit Adventure often instructs movements within a limited timeframe, causing frustration for some users. For example, a reviewer expressed exhaustion from attempting to keep up with the rapidly changing instructions on the screen before even starting the game. Upon reaching the end of the warm-up screen, the player felt upset by the avatar's representation, sarcastically remarking on the disparity between himself and the character. As shown in fig. 2, due to improper gestures while holding the Ring-Con, the screen consistently failed to register the completion of the "Hold" instruction. The user was unaware that their improper operation was the reason they could not proceed to the next step. Fig. 2: Ring Fit Adventure using time continuing into a “Hold” instruction. Adapted from Jiang and Tham, "The Thing-Power of Ring Fit Adventure as Embodied Play: Tracing New Materialist Rhetoric across Physical and Cultural Borders." All Ring Fit Adventure fitness tasks are completed through its narrative story mode. Once users experience the entire story, they achieve a sense of accomplishment. However, this sense of accomplishment is tied primarily to completing the game's narrative rather than to the experience itself. As a result, many users abandon Ring Fit Adventure after completing the story (Jiang and Tham). Ideally, task difficulty should increase as users’ skills and confidence develop. However, users' body shapes, abilities, endurance, and sense of accomplishment inadvertently add complexity to the task-setting process in fitness products. Rewards Need to Be Aligned with the User's Interests Reward systems such as points, coins, rewards, prizes, competitions, and challenges are widely used gamification design (McGonigal). However, compared to goal setting and social communities, rewards solely focussed on encouraging users to complete performance goals do not sustain engagement over time (Groening and Binnewies). Cotton and Patel investigated the gamification elements used in the top 50 most frequently downloaded fitness apps by iPhone users. The most frequently employed gamification elements (as shown in Table 2) were goal-setting and social influence. This is because goal-setting is easiest to design and implement, and social influence aligns with social challenges gamification. However, the use of points, levels, unlockable content, and lifelines was found to be of low frequency. Table 2: Gamification elements used in fitness apps. Gamification Feature Description Frequency of Use % Goal setting Performance-based measures and targets 25/32, 78.1 Social influences Performance is publicly displayed or ability to communicate directly with another user 25/32, 78.1 Challenges Time-limited goals or competitions 20/32, 62.5 Collaboration Work together with other members to achieve a goal 15/32, 46.9 Competition Compete with other users either head-to-head or through leaderboards 13/32, 40.6 High scores Tracking of best attempts at goals or challenges 7/32, 21.9 Badges Recognition earned for completing specific milestones 6/32, 18.8 Narrative A story is used to provide context for targeting a goal 4/32, 12.53 Streaks Recognition for consecutive goal achievement 3/32, 9.4 Points Accumulate points that help progress through game or can be redeemed for rewards 2/32, 6.3 Levels Progress through parts of the game (e.g., level 1 to level 2) or gradients of status (e.g., bronze level or silver level) 1/32, 3.1 Unlockable content Access to enhanced functionality or content for accumulating experience or achieving a specific goal 1/32, 3.1 Lifelines Ability to obtain help or gain a second chance at completing a goal 0/32, 0 Note. Adapted from Cotton and Patel's study of the most commonly used gamification features in 50 popular health and fitness apps. Studies by Hamari, Koivisto, and Sarsa and Seaborn and Fels also found that points, badges, and leaderboards, although widely recognised as core gamification elements, do not necessarily motivate users in fitness apps. Edwards et al. and Lister et al. suggest that user dissatisfaction with rewards stems from their primary focus on task completion rather than users’ individual interests or experiences. Our participants shared that praise as a form of reward does not motivate users, which aligns to Cotton and Patel’s case study, if the descriptions within the rewards feature are presented in a robotic manner. For example, “Your goal in this task is to complete fifteen exercises and advance to the next level”, “Your aim is to achieve a certain proficiency level within a specified time limit”, “You can invite other players to challenge a goal together.” In Jiang and Tham's case study on Ring Fit Adventure, phrases like "You are doing great!", "Nice!", "Well done!", and "Perfect!" in English are good. However, when these expressions are translated into another language like Chinese, Chinese players laugh because such expressions in this context are unfamiliar to their culture. Our participants further shared that many reward mechanisms are unchanging, causing users to become accustomed to rewards and pay less attention to them. This finding aligns to Skinner, who proposed that digital rewards should be allocated on a variable reinforcement schedule to maintain engagement; without this, individuals might become accustomed to receiving rewards, leading to a decrease in motivation over time. Tasks and Rewards Can Be Designed throughout the Fitness Journey The study conducted a three-hour interview and asked ‘How Might We’ questions about setting tasks and gaining rewards in fitness apps. This approach could gain deeper insights into the relationship between setting appropriately challenging tasks and motivating users through sustainable rewards within gamification strategies in fitness apps. Participants' reflections highlighted several recurring themes: The process plays a more critical role than task completion. Well-designed situations can provide participants with challenges, excitement, and emotional value, even when difficult goals are set. The data showed that participants are more engaged in the immersive experience, allowing them to forget the physical exertion. These two insights illustrate the power of immersive environments in supporting complex tasks. The concept of immersion can be central in explorations of gamification, specifically in understandings of users’ subjective feelings and flow. The reward mechanism does not necessarily need to be established only after the completion of the workout, with participants indicating that the reward mechanism during the fitness process has not yet been fully developed. Conclusion Gamification plays an important role in fitness app design, yet its current implementation does not always support sustained engagement with physical activity. This study highlights three considerations for future fitness app design: (1) tasks need to account for users’ ability to grow, (2) digital rewards should be aligned with users’ interests, and (3) tasks and rewards should be designed to accompany users throughout their fitness journey. Together these findings provide practical design considerations for using gamification to better support sustained engagement in fitness apps. Fitness apps provide an important platform for promoting physical activity, yet current evidence suggests that the implementation of gamification often emphasises motivation while overlooking other key components of health behaviour change, particularly users' capabilities and opportunities to sustain engagement. Although gamification can encourage initial participation through rewards, challenges, and social interaction, its effectiveness depends on how well these elements are integrated with behavioural theory and users' lived experiences. The findings of this review suggest that effective fitness app design should move beyond isolated game mechanics towards a more comprehensive approach that combines gamification with health behaviour theory, personalised task design, and meaningful user engagement. Such an approach has the potential to better support sustained engagement with physical activity while informing the future design of fitness apps in China. 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It is almost two years since I stopped teaching in a secondary school in Magandjin/Brisbane, Australia. I could feel myself cracking, becoming cynical and worn down by the expectations of the education system—a system that, I felt, was less and less interested in the people involved and more interested in standardisation and the data and results these people produced. I could feel my teaching becoming restricted by external values that ran counter to my own. My individuality and ethics as a person with experiences and thoughts were becoming less and less important. The ideas and wonderings of my students had diminishing space in which to be heard and considered. I felt I needed some time away. Teacher and scholar Margie Appel explains this well, highlighting a professional and systemic imbalance in Australian schools perniciously affecting teachers, noting a lack of professional autonomy, stifled creativity for teachers and students, and an absence of trust in teachers from school leaders. Black feminist educator and critic bell hooks reflects on her own experiences of needing time away from teaching. She describes a sense of gloom, her diminishing energy, and the sense her classroom was beginning to feel like “a closed-down space” (Teaching Community 13). She writes that she no longer had the energy to cope with the systemic and cultural “obstacles” that had always been there. She too keenly felt a need for some time away from teaching to reconsider and reflect, to create an opportunity for herself to “think of new ways to be immersed in teaching” (Teaching Community 21). hooks’s writing is honest and sounds deeply with me. There is sadness in her realisation­—a mourning for something lost and a recognition of something that cannot be unfelt. But there is also hope and possibility and strength as she continues to teach in a new and renewed way. These teacherly feelings draw me to communication scholar Bryant Keith Alexander’s reflexive concept of standing in the wake. Alexander uses the metaphor of standing in the wake to “represent a time after experience for critical reflection” (98), describing this phrase as “a metaphor for reflexivity, a critical act of standing in the present critically reflecting on past experience, a positionality” (105). He describes the wake as “the rack left in water by a vessel or any other body moving through it” (103) and “a stream of turbulence” (104). In my case, time away from high school teaching has afforded me distance from it and a new perspective on what my teaching might be/be becoming. While this decision has, in some ways, created turbulence, it has also provided a stillness and calm from the pressures and fast tempos of a high school. I am standing in the wake of my teaching and teacherlyness but still very much in, and surrounded by, the waters of it. To clarify, this article is not me reflecting on my teaching experience—the number of years spent doing so, the subjects, the specific lessons, the year levels, and so on—but rather an account of my experience teaching. How do I experience teaching? How does my teaching feel? Curriculum scholar Ted Aoki encourages us to shift our educational discourse away from technical rationality and the doing of teaching and towards the presence and thoughtfulness found in the being of teaching. He reminds us that in our attempts to understand teaching we should try to “reorient ourselves … so that we can see and hear our doings as teaching harboured within pedagogical being, so we can see and hear who we are as teachers” (197, emphasis in original). Aoki’s writings resonate with musical terminology and sonorous observations. He suggests the improvisation of curriculum, the sound and the silence found in classrooms. He asks us to listen to, to hear, to be attuned to our teaching, to move beyond the “ocularcentrism in Western epistemology” (xvi). He is feeling teaching. When I think of my experience teaching, it is these ideas of sounds, attunement, feeling, and presence that call out to me. In what follows, I stand in the wake, reflecting upon my teaching and my teacherlyness, focussing on the feelings of improvising, joy, and galumphing. Teaching feels like improvising but not in a metaphorical sense. I am an improvising musician, taught and playing mostly in the jazz tradition, and the doing and the being of teaching feels remarkably similar to the doing and being of playing this music. Improvisation isn’t unprepared, but it can be unpredictable. Improvisation can be interactive, responsive, and highly collaborative. Artistic freedom and expression can be found within structures and rules. Exemplary in this area are written works by Keith Sawyer, Ingrid Monson, Daniel Fischlin, and musical works: Spirograph Studies, and Ron Miles. Recently, I’ve begun rehearsing again with a jazz trio: saxophone, double bass, and drums. I play the drums. We are playing original music written by the saxophone player, Luke, for a series of performances and an upcoming recording, but also just to play music together. We’ve been playing together on and off for several years, but from the first rehearsal, this time around felt different. Luke writes what he fondly refers to as sketches of songs: ideas that grab him unexpectedly and demand to be written down immediately. He’s been notating these ideas differently, in a digital notebook (as opposed to musical notation software), as there is a freedom in the process of writing this way, he says, where the unfinished idea that tumbles out feels less fixed and aesthetically more open to being developed, changed, questioned (for example, see fig. 1). As a fellow ensemble member, my experience of this music is also different: the very fact that the notes don’t look as final on the page as notation software renders, there is ambiguity as to placement, and mistakes where Luke has written something 'wrong', or forgotten to include something harmonically or rhythmically important, means there is possibility and openness in this music. The sketches are inviting us all in to learn them and wanting our ideas and voices to join them. Fig. 1: Eerie/Beautiful. Image courtesy of Luke. This music visually welcomes collaboration and questions. This is music unsure what it might sound like. And we are musicians wondering how we might play it and how we might make it sound. Alongside these sketches, Luke tells us his inspiration or intentions for each song. These can be very clear or quite vague. But regardless, there is something within each sketch that resonates strongly within him that he wants to share, even if it is just the joyful feeling of playing the melody. The experience of playing this music and playing in this ensemble is how I try to teach in the classroom. What I mean by this is that there is openness, opportunity, and unexpectedness in these rehearsals but there is also preparation, a perspective, and a possible outcome. We three meet knowing that we will be learning and making music together but not knowing what that might sound like or how far we might get in that process. Education theorist Gert Biesta writes about what he believes to be two fundamental elements of teaching: showing and explaining (44–8). The teacher shows something they think is interesting, or worth noticing, to their students, and offers them an explanation of what they feel is noteworthy, but also gives their students space to critique it, consider it in their own way, and offer their thoughts. Critical education theorist Paulo Freire provides a similar notion that he terms “a little introductory exposition” (123), in which a teacher makes a brief presentation of a subject and then students and teacher analyse and question together the subject and presentation. He writes that in this way, “the teacher challenges the students, who thereupon question themselves and question the teacher, and thereby share in plumbing the depths of, developing, the initial exposition” (123). In this process, the teacherly act becomes less about instruction and more about invitation. Students are invited into the teacher’s thinking but do not conform to it, nor are they limited by it. The object and subject provide an opportunity for individual and collaborative thinking and reflection on the object and the self as the students bring their selves to bear on the object. I feel this is what Luke is offering to us in these rehearsals. Just as students and teacher in the classroom environments I foster, we three too gather around the thing Luke is showing us and explaining to us (his composition) and bring our perspectives to bear on it. We all regard it, think about it, play and improvise with it, and with each other and through this process we come to know this composition, ourselves, and each other a little more. We each bring different perspectives to bear on this composition and, as such, may notice different things or derive meanings different from Luke’s, which are then shared with the group sonically through our music-making and through discussions during and after each rehearsal. These rehearsals are full of risk-taking, mistakes, conversation, listening, joy: improvisation. These rehearsals are full of the sound of learning and teaching and creating. These rehearsals are lessons. Our music-making, our improvising, is our learning. This feels like my teaching. Teaching feels joyful; teaching is joyful. This seems somewhat contrary to what I outlined in the opening to this piece, and in some ways it is, but it is also a crucial part of my experience. hooks argues the need “to emphasize that the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel” (Teaching to Transgress 10). And I do feel these feelings too. I have been very bored and uninterested in the classroom and school setting. There is much in the culture and systems of education that demands a beige compliance among teachers and students, a systemic stultification, to borrow philosopher Jacques Ranciere’s (7) term, which sneaks slowly to numb and deaden the minds and bodies and places and things that reside in a school. But despite the systemic pressures and the mechanical focus on outcomes and data, there is much joy to be found. There is much joy I find in teaching. There is the joy I feel when a student has a 'moment'—something is suddenly understood, unveiled, connected. This is a combination of my internal satisfaction and happiness for the student, coupled with the obvious joy the student is experiencing and sharing. There is the pure joy in being in and among the space of my classroom, in with the learning, so to speak. This is a vibrant and alive place in which to reside, a place rich in ideas upon which I could base or create further lessons. There is the joy found outside the classroom or after the lesson, sometimes in the staffroom talking with colleagues, or even the walk from one classroom to the next—the reflective joy when I am thinking back on a lesson of which I am particularly proud, or the student’s 'moment', or a sequence of a lesson, or an idea that I hoped would 'work', even if I didn’t know how, and that I felt really did. One of the best joys, though, is the sense of being on the edge of something, collaboratively. Something unexpected has emerged in the lesson, and it feels exciting. This is a vanguard in the lesson. Unexpected, unpredictable, full of possibility and opportunity. It draws everyone in. No one is entirely sure where this is all going, or maybe how it even arrived, but suddenly there is energy in the room and a combination of intense focus, listening, and openness. Multiple voices are speaking, their ideas overlapping as they rush out. I may have withdrawn slightly from the centre of the action, off to one side observing, but maybe offering ideas too, probably laughing, asking questions, following the threads. Or perhaps I am in the thick of it, connecting people’s ideas together, sharing my own, or just sitting among it listening to the lesson being created in real time as we are all swept up in joyful enthusiasm. These moments sound rowdy and happy. These moments sound like Luke’s rehearsals. They feel like improvising. What is remarkable is that despite the pressures on teachers, these joyful moments happen. And these joyful moments spread throughout the culture of that group and that room. They bounce back off the walls and resonate within the classroom space. Their echoes remind everyone that this is a space where joy, and silliness, and curiosity can live alongside rows of desks, assessment dates, and effort. Because the presence of joy and happiness in a classroom or teaching practice does not suggest the absence of focus, professionalism, intention, or learning. As educator Ron Scapp reminds us, “joy can be present along with hard work. Not every moment in the classroom will necessarily be one that brings you immediate pleasure, but that doesn't preclude the possibility of joy” (in hooks, Teaching to Transgress 154). The possibility of joy. Hard work does not preclude the possibility of joy, and joy does not preclude the possibility of hard work. Practising the drums can be hard work, and learning music can be hard work, and teaching can be too, but all can be immensely joyful. Teaching feels like it might be galumphing, and this is a new feeling, one that has emerged in my time away—an exciting, unfinished thought that brings me to the end of this writing. This new feeling is founded on, and found in, experiences of improvising and joy such as I have described above. Galumphing is a term not really found in any educational literature or writing, save a couple of old online music education blogs such as this one. Galumphing is a nonce word created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass from the nonsense poem within, 'Jabberwocky', to describe the heavy, triumphant galloping return of the hero of the poem after vanquishing the monstrous Jabberwock: “One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! / He left it dead, and with its head / He went galumphing back” (132). Anthropologist Stephen Miller uses the term “galumph” to describe the “unique ‘galumphing’ quality” he observes in the physical play of juvenile baboons, which “involves much flailing, bobbing, exaggeration, and indirect, ineffective action” (89). It now also describes the movement of seals on land and is sung in the children’s song Der Glumph/Galumph Went the Little Green Frog. Improviser, musician, and educator Stephen Nachmanovitch extends Miller’s concept, weaving galumphing and its joyful, play-based elements explicitly into modes of creativity and making art. Nachmanovitch writes that galumphing is the seemingly useless elaboration and ornamentation of activity. It is profligate, excessive, exaggerated, uneconomical. We galumph when we hop instead of walk, when we take the scenic route instead of the efficient one, when we play a game whose rules demand a limitation of our powers, when we are interested in means rather than in ends. (26–7) Miller explains that galumphing operates within the hierarchies of social groups and yet the play-based feature of it is “ahierarchical” (90), as younger animals invite older, more senior animals to play. It is a collaborative activity within the hierarchy of the social group that allows for a flexibility but overall retention in roles. Galumphing doesn’t suspend the notion of rules or outcomes either. Rather, those engaged in the activity create specific rules or “obstacles”, as Miller (91) and Nachmanovitch (44) describe, which are embedded as part of the play. These obstacles are voluntarily created purely for the pleasure of overcoming them (Nachmanovitch 44). I think my teaching feels like galumphing. Perhaps most pertinent to me is that there is a valuing of process over outcomes or results, but not at the exclusion of them. The feeling of collective improvisation on the edge of something emerging in a classroom is an experience that is one of being in the process: responding to unexpected questions and replying with my own; spending fifteen minutes talking about my new favourite hat; or sitting with a group of students and listening to their ideas, telling them they are all brilliant, and then walking away to do something else. This might be galumphing in the classroom. This joyful vanguard reframes the roles in the classroom, as those participating are brought into the space to play with ideas together. The joy here is found in the unexpectedness and surprise that this playful moment welcomes and the new obstacles that are created in the process. Unlike the imposition of external obstacles, these are personalised and bespoke to this moment; they are our obstacles, representative of the character of our classroom. As the teacher, I strive to keep us hopping and skipping along in this elaborated means to an end, interacting and responding to the class, knowing that the end—or better yet, an end—will reveal itself, that the process is the purpose. As Miller explains, this type of play “is not means without the end; it is a crooked line to the end; it circumnavigates obstacles put there by the player or voluntarily acceded to” (93). Luke’s music is full of crooked lines that welcome the ornamentation of our musical interpretations, and we create our own obstacles: What if we played it like this? Can we change that? I’m going to try this. This music is being created to be shared—the ends of our rehearsals—but we spend much more time revelling in the joyful galumphing along the way. The values that underpin my teaching—joy, improvisation, play, collaboration, listening—feel like galumphing. There is a lot galumphing may reveal about education that is beyond the scope of this article, which I will be returning to in future writing as I consider ‘galumphing in the classroom’ in more depth. Both Luke’s jazz and ensemble and my classroom are framed by hierarchies, ends, and obstacles. There are rules and expectations that are socially recognised and even required. But there is joyful freedom and improvisation too. A galumphing quality can be found within these spaces. My teaching feels like galumphing? References Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Standing in the Wake: A Critical Auto/Ethnographic Exercise on Reflexivity in Three Movements.” Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 11.2 (2011): 98–107. Aoki, Ted. “Layered Voices of Teaching: The Uncannily Correct and The Elusively True (1992).” Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Eds. William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin. Routledge, 2011. 187-98. Appel, Margie. “Performativity and the Demise of the Teaching Profession: The Need for Rebalancing in Australia.” Asia Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 48.3 (2020): 301-5. Biesta, Gert. Letting Art Teach. ArtEZ P, 2017. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Penguin Books, 1872/1998. Fischlin, Daniel. “Worldmaking Pedagogies: Improvising as Learning / Leaning as Improvisation.” The Improviser’s Classroom: Pedagogies for Cocreative Worldmaking. Eds. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Lomanno. Temple UP, 2024. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope. Bloomsbury, 1994/2021. hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, 2003. ———. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994. “Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll.” Poetry Foundation. 15 Sep. 2026 . “Megan Washington Performs Der Glumph.” YouTube, uploaded by ABC Kids, 18 July 2022. . Miles, Ron. Old Main Chapel, Blue Note Records, 2024. YouTube. . Miller, Stephen. “Ends, Means, and Galumphing: Some Leitmotifs of Play.” American Anthropologist 75.1 (1973): 87–98. Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction. U of Chicago P, 1996. Music Improv. “’Galumphing’ in the Classroom.” Improvisation in Music Education, 26 Feb. 2008. 26 July 2025 . Nachmanovitch, Stephen. FreePlay: Improvisation in Life and Art. Penguin Putnam, 1990. ———. The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life. New World Library, 2019. Pinar, William. “Foreword.” Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Eds. William F. Pinar and Rita L. Irwin. Routledge, 2011. xv-xvii. Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant School Master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford UP, 1991. Sawyer, Keith. The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for the 21st-Century. Teachers College P, 2019. Spirograph Studies. Kindness, Not Courtesy, Opening Gambit Music, 2019. YouTube. . “Your Visual Guide to Sea Lion and Seal Behaviour.” The Marine Mammal Center, 18 Feb. 2025. 9 Aug. 2025 .

Fig. 1: River Portal, 2025. Botanical inks, wax on canvas. Artwork by Kelsey Ashe. Introduction: Experience, Ritual, and Irreproducibility in a Post-AI Image Culture The Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century positioned ‘irrational’ experience such as intuitive or unconscious knowledge at the core of creative innovation. To bypass the constraints of rational thought, artists developed techniques of automatism, including écriture automatique (automatic writing), frottage (rubbings), fumage (smoke impressions), and decalcomania (chance transfers). Max Ernst is credited with popularising decalcomania in his ambiguous landscapes, but the technique was expanded by artists such as Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington, who approached the process through their own imaginative and philosophical frameworks. The Surrealist artists saw its potential to allow accidental formations to co-author the image. In Colquhoun’s essay of 1939, The Mantic Stain, she describes this chance mark-making as akin to divination, where blots and spills functioned as portals to visionary knowledge. She emphasised the material unpredictability and embodied nature of this art practice as fundamentally experiential and therefore central to a reading of Surrealist automatism. This essay extends that lineage into contemporary practice, examining how experience—framed phenomenologically and materially—continues to shape artmaking today. Drawing from my own engagement with automatism, I argue that working in a state of flow and in dialogue with seasonal thresholds such as solstices and equinoxes generates artworks that are irreproducible events: performative encounters in which light, atmosphere, and environment collaborate with chance to create singular aesthetic outcomes. These works exist not as static objects but as embodied records of lived experience, inseparable from the conditions of their making. Foregrounding the experiential also provides a response to contemporary debates on artificial intelligence and image reproducibility. As alluring as the use of AI might be, automatism offers a means of resistance to safeguard against its superficiality. Its practice is grounded in material accident and environmental aura which resists the homogenising tendencies of algorithmic image culture. In this sense, Surrealist automatism offers both historical precedent and contemporary relevance: a model of art-making that values presence over digitised reproduction. This framework is best understood through phenomenology and Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action: whereas AI operates through pre-coded datasets and algorithmic recombination, automatist practices emerge from entangled encounters in which artist, matter, and environment co-constitute one another (Barad 33). Such processes cannot be replicated because they enact becoming rather than reproduction. This article argues for the continued relevance of Surrealist women’s legacies as frameworks for rethinking artmaking as experiential encounter. I situate my own experiments within this lineage, proposing a synthesis of automatist practice and seasonal ritual as a way of reclaiming the irreducible in contemporary art. The ‘mantic stain of experience’ names this exchange—a process in which accident, aura, and time coalesce, and where the artwork insists on its singularity as a lived and marvellous encounter. André Breton described the marvellous as unusual happenings that disrupt the everyday to reveal a deeper strangeness already latent in reality (Breton 15). In revisiting and extending these traditions, I suggest that the Surrealist pursuit of chance and the irrational offer an alternative to the reproducibility and disembodiment of digital AI culture. Automatism and the Surrealist Inheritance Surrealism’s early theorists defined automatism as a deliberate suspension of rational control (the planning, analysing, and reductive mind) to allow involuntary processes (the generative unconscious mind) to guide the production of art. André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism championed a “pure automatism” where automatic writing was described as “dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason” (Breton 87). Later, Breton gave precise instructions for decalcomania using “black gouache on a sheet of shiny paper …. [to] express yourself in the most personal and valuable way” (Breton 221). Visual artists including Max Ernst, Óscar Domínguez, and André Masson incorporated these ideas into experimental methods aimed at bypassing pre-planned composition, deliberately reframing artmaking away from the pursuit of technical mastery and instead toward recording a ‘pure’ encounter with matter and chance. Although Max Ernst’s experiments with automatism were highly influential, it was women Surrealists who expanded these methods into more embodied, ecological, and spiritual registers. Whitney Chadwick observes in Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement that figures such as Leonora Carrington and Ithell Colquhoun resisted the strict theoretical limits of pure automatism set out by Breton and other leaders of the movement. Colquhoun described decalcomania as a ‘mantic stain’, charged with visionary potential and a technique that could provide a consistent method of linking the surreal with the hermetic both philosophically and technically. For her, the accidental mark was not merely suggestive of unconscious imagery but a site where world, spirit, and imagination intersected. Though the Surrealists celebrated the “marvellous”, they rejected overt forms of spiritualism. Within the British Group, E.L.T. Mesens grew hostile toward theosophical or occult frameworks, resulting in Colquhoun’s “abrupt expulsion” (Matheson 122) from the group in 1940 for refusing to renounce her esoteric studies (Chadwick 189). Carrington likewise bristled against Breton’s rigid leadership, later describing the “judgemental side of Surrealism” as “extremely distasteful” (Chadwick 12). Breton was arguably ambivalent: although he was enthralled by esoteric and occult themes, he dismissed spiritualist practice outright, remarking that “the hypothesis of ‘spirits’ [was] ridiculous” (Choucha 53). Despite facing marginalisation after being excluded from the group, Colquhoun continued her automatist practice throughout her career and refused to cease her affiliations with esoteric organisations including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Society of the Inner Light, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Druid Order, and Co-Masonry. Leonora Carrington, a painter and novelist, brought autobiographical and mythological depth to automatist practice. In her stories and artworks, forms take on metamorphic presences: hybrids of plant, animal, human, and spirit, suggesting fluid identities and visionary transformation. Both women were searching for a subjective embodiment of their own inner world of personally grounded poetics. Colquhoun was interested in broadening automatism beyond Breton’s psychological approach to automatism, stating “Breton here does not deal with any possible development of the automatic image beyond conveying the possibility of this by an imaginative title” (Colquhoun, 224). She positioned it as a practice of experience: embodied, mystical, and relational, where the act of making ‘spoke’ to the artist, suggesting its content in real time. Her methodology in automatism was not simply about relinquishing control but about entering into deeper engagement with self-analysis, religious belief, and spiritual practice. While early art history often framed Surrealist automatism as a matter of style or technique, its deeper significance lies in the shift it enacts toward phenomenological experience. Contemporary scholarship influenced by Merleau-Ponty and feminist or psychoanalytic theory understands automatism as an embodied practice in which, during the ‘staged event’ of decalcomania, pigment, pressure, atmosphere, and gesture converge with forces beyond conscious control to disclose forms that feel both accidental and inevitable—the unknown becoming known. The value of these techniques therefore lies less in the images they produce, which can be easily imitated, than in the experiential process they enact, offering a vital precedent for contemporary artists resisting the homogenising reproducibility of AI-generated images. Ithell Colquhoun and Decalcomania as Experiential Event Ithell Colquhoun’s integration of art and occult practice was unusually extensive, encompassing automatic painting, poetry, ceremonial magic, alchemical symbolism, esoteric colour theory, Tarot, Gnosticism, Numerology, Druidry, Kabbalah, Tantra, and Celtic Mysticism, extending far beyond stylistic experimentation into a deeply integrated personal cosmology. Her archive—now held at Tate—comprises over 5,000 items, including dozens of written works. She consistently pursued ‘mantic automatism’ (Norris) and structured hermetic systems within her art practice that evolved in dialogue with her writing. She theorised her practice with decalcomania in The Mantic Stain, naming the resulting forms as oracular signs bearing visionary messages. Colquhoun connected image-making with ceremonial ritual: ‘mantic’ (divinatory) practices such as reading tea leaves. She believed that imagery created by automatic methods was closely tied to the ‘unconscious mood’ of the artist and that visions were unique to each encounter. As she noted, “in many fascinating psychological studies Jung has shown how the alchemist would release the contents of his own subliminal fantasy by intently watching the contents of the alembic” (Colquhoun 221). Because each viewer projects their own associations onto the image, symbols and forms reveal themselves differently, confirming her conviction that automatist images function less as fixed representations and more as visionary experience. Just as the random pattern of tea leaves may be read as portent, the ink blot has long served as a site of projection, most notably in the Rorschach test, where subjective perception is analysed for psychological insight. Colquhoun extended this logic into Surrealist practice, aligning the four alchemical elements with automatic methods: fire with fumage, earth with decalcomania, water with écrémage (marbling transfers), and air with parsemage (air dispersal of powders across a surface). She notes that these processes all have an “ancestry in that they are traceably allied to the ‘great work’ of alchemy” (Colquhoun 222), drawing her processes further into the realm of occult knowledge and her serious engagement with esoteric traditions. Taking a phenomenological perspective, where the conscious, lived experience is considered, Colquhoun developed the understanding of automatism toward an oracular process, linking material process to natural and spiritual forces, and shifting it from technical experiment to embodied, temporal, and ontological event. Gaston Bachelard’s influential book The Poetics of Space reminds us in his Introduction that perception is not passive reception but active and engaged with the sensory world. In decalcomania, the artist’s body, the viscosity of paint or ink, the environment and weather, the timing and pace of working are all co-actors. The resulting image is not a product of the artist’s intention alone, but a residue of encounter between human, natural, and nonhuman forces. In this sense, decalcomania collapses the distinction between making and experiencing: to produce the work is to undergo an enigmatic event. Through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away. Because of its novelty and its action, the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own; it is referable to a direct ontology … it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation … the poetic image will have a sonority of being. The poet speaks on the threshold of being. Therefore, in order to determine the being of an image, we shall have to experience its reverberation in the manner of … phenomenology. (Bachelard xviii–xx) For Bachelard, the ‘poetic’ image is not a product of cause and effect but of ‘reverberation’, meaning that it carries its own vitality and a resonance that ‘echoes’, awakening memory, imagination, and being, often subconsciously, without any logical explanation. To understand an image, therefore, is not to analyse its causes but to undergo its reverberation phenomenologically, as lived experience. This experiential turn distinguishes automatism from the reproducible logic of stylistic imitation. While a surface pattern produced through decalcomania could be visually mimicked, what cannot be reproduced is the moment of its emergence: the unrepeatable instant. The resulting texture is not only visual but temporal and haptic, inscribed with the circumstances of its becoming, often with an immediate ‘message’ for the maker. The artwork becomes both a finished object and a trace of lived duration. It is this emphasis on encounter that makes automatism a vital framework for contemporary practice. In foregrounding the irreducible event of making, decalcomania situates art not in the mastery of image but in the ‘mantic’, unpredictable unfolding of experience. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad outlines the concept of “intra-action”, a term that resists the notion of discrete, pre-existing entities that simply interact. For Barad, “agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (Barad 33). Through this lens, decalcomania is not merely the artist applying pigment to a surface and awaiting accident, but an intra-active process in which hand, pigment, atmosphere, and temporality co-constitute one another. The image that emerges is inseparable from the event of its becoming, and the artist is transformed by the encounter as much as the work itself. Such a reading positions automatism not as a static technique but as an evolving entanglement—a choreography of forces that challenges simplistic notions of authorship and intention. Seasonal Automatism: Experience as Collaboration If Surrealist automatism offered a way to access the unconscious through material chance, a contemporary extension could move toward ecological and seasonal experience. Colquhoun’s The Mantic Stain of 1939 proposed that the blot or stain could serve as divinatory portals, situating the act of making within ritual, ceremony, and occult knowledge. I suggest that widening the scope of influential energies to specific planetary alignments and astronomical events can add depth and intention to this experiential and entangled making. My own practice builds on this lineage through seasonal alignment, shown in a work created during the astronomical spectacle known as Lion’s Gate. This annual August configuration occurs when the Sun transits Leo, the star Sirius makes its heliacal rising next to the Sun, and Orion’s Belt appears prominently at dawn. This celestial convergence has long been regarded by diverse cultures as symbolically and energetically potent. Its logic is not entirely esoteric; the Sun itself, as a star, provides life through warmth, fertilisation, and photosynthesis, while ancient cosmologies recognised that other stars, when rising or aligning with the Sun, exerted subtle yet powerful influences upon natural earthly cycles. In the Southern Hemisphere this period coincides with Imbolc (Celtic) and Djilba (Nyungar), the midpoint between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, when the first signs of spring emerge and the return of the Sun’s nourishing energy is most vividly affirmed. Phenomenologically, to work within this alignment is to situate artistic practice in dialogue with celestial movement and seasonal change. In Bachelard’s sense, the experience reverberates with poetic intensity, where the image carries echoes beyond causality into memory and imagination. From a Merleau-Pontian perspective, it is also an embodied perception: the artist’s gestures, breath, and tactile engagement with pigment are inseparable from the unfolding moment. I produced River Portal by entering the forest during the peak of Lions Gate, working by the river, where the Sun and Sirius/Orion (though invisible during the day) were facing my workspace on the forest floor. After observing my surroundings, I rapidly scattered powdered botanical dyes (parsemage), wax, salts, and resins across the canvas in relation to the landscape’s colours, mixing the earthy pigments with river water, then dragging the surface through the forest floor so that moss, leaves, stains, and streaks imprinted themselves. I allowed the Sun to guide the positioning of the canvas over a period of one hour, by moving with its arc of light to eventually arrive on a steep incline by the river, where the canvas began to drain vertically, causing the surface to arrange into a multitude of decalcomanic textures. Working with natural pigments rather than synthetic paints, I was pleased that these would not harm the landscape. My intention was to work with the environment, barefoot and grounded, recording my ritual on video to capture the lived encounter. At one point, a kangaroo entered the work, licking the pigment and scoring lines across the wet surface—an intervention that exemplified the Surrealist marvellous, unplanned and irreproducible. I responded with my own impulsive sgraffito, scratching back into wet blotches of powder without a predetermined image. Fig. 2 (left): the artist in the forest during Lions Portal; Fig. 3 (centre): decalcomanic marks and parsemage stains from natural botanical inks, detail from River Portal, 2025; Fig. 4 (right): the artist working in the forest on River Portal. I situate automatism not only as psychological release but as ecological encounter. To make art in this way was to acknowledge that the season, in this case Imbolc, when the ‘return’ of the Sun brings a riot of blossoming new growth, can affect both material and mood. The long shadows of late winter mornings, the dampness of river air, and the vegetal chemistry of resins, salts, eucalypt, and rosehip all left their imprint, their ‘mantic stain’ in the raw canvas. Unlike the reproducible surface of a digital image, the resulting work is irreducible to formula: it is a record of when and where, inseparable from the moment of its making. The kangaroo’s scratches, like Colquhoun’s divinatory stains, remind us that the work of art can exceed the artist’s intention, bearing the mark of forces beyond control. In this way, the act of making becomes an event of collaboration: seasonal, cosmic, and embodied, yet also unpredictable and vital. Surrealist automatism thus expands here into what I call ecological automatism. It is not simply the unconscious mind that is liberated but the agency of material, time, and environment. This resonates with contemporary eco-critical readings of Surrealism that emphasise the porousness of self and world. As Kristoffer Noheden argues, Surrealism’s critique of anthropocentrism and its fascination with nature already fostered a “proto-ecological awareness” in works by Leonora Carrington, where transformation depends on intersubjective encounters with animals, landscapes, and mythic forces (Noheden 259). Automatism, in this sense, parallels organic growth itself—Colquhoun’s automatic drawings mirrored natural processes, suggesting that “the writing of nature also proceeds according to automatism” (Noheden 263). Abigail Susik further reminds us that Surrealist automatism was never a closed system but always entwined with autobiography, dream, and the body, destabilising any fixed sense of self while opening to the world (Susik 56). Ecological automatism builds on these insights: it frames artistic making as an intra-active process in which environmental elements and human gesture co-constitute one another to generate imagery. A fellow artist commented that my method was akin to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings; however, there is an important difference. Pollock was introduced to and had engaged with surrealist automatism but rejected the idea that his work was mere chance, saying: “I deny the accident” (Pollock 144). For Pollock, control and improvisation created deliberate compositions in what became known as Action Painting. His drip technique wasn’t purely technical either: it carried elements of chance, but he ultimately reframed it as conscious action, not subconscious dictation. Experience vs. Reproducibility: A Response to AI By aligning artmaking with temporal points such as Imbolc or energetic portals like Lions Gate, the process inscribes the work with an intangible aura. It becomes a textural residue of experience, asserting its irreproducible singularity, where the stains and scratches are not just marks but momentary fragments of lived encounter where artist, world, and cosmos briefly converge. The question of reproducibility has troubled debates on art since the early twentieth century. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” argued that the proliferation of photographic and cinematic technologies diminished the ‘aura’ of the artwork and its singular presence in time and space (Benjamin 217–52). In the twentyfirst century, artificial intelligence raises this question with renewed urgency. AI generated images, trained on vast datasets, endlessly mimic style and texture, but may lack the fusion that creates ‘aura’. Surrealist automatism offers a critical counterpoint. Techniques such as decalcomania and frottage are irreducibly tied to the circumstances of their making: the viscosity of pigment, the pressure of the hand, the humidity of the air, the chance of encounter. As River Portal demonstrates, when these techniques are further aligned with seasonal and cosmic thresholds, the resulting work is inseparable from lived temporality and environment. It is not only the form but the experience that constitutes the artwork; AI cannot replicate this. AI-generated artworks can be compelling and fast to produce, even containing elements of chance, yet remain detached from the possibilities of phenomenological encounter. They simulate surface but cannot recreate the lived and sensory perception of matter, atmosphere, gesture, and texture. By contrast, decalcomania and related automatist practices draw their vitality from precisely these conditions. Its outputs may approximate the appearance of frottage or of forest floor impressions, but it cannot embody the ritual act of scattering resins, tannins, and river water, nor the unpredictable gesture of animal collaboration, nor can it ‘hold’ the energy of the particular angle of light in early August. This is not to position AI as an adversary to be dismissed, but to underline the distinctiveness of experiential practices. Where AI thrives in speed, replication, and pattern recognition, Surrealist-inspired practices reclaim slowness, unpredictability, and happenstance. In doing so, they offer a form of resistance to homogenisation. To return to Colquhoun’s phrase, the ‘mantic stain’ of experience is precisely what cannot be simulated. It exceeds image alone by collaboration with forces beyond control. In a cultural landscape where images proliferate endlessly, this experiential dimension becomes ever more essential, because it roots art in lived time, reminders of our entanglement with the more-than-human world that no algorithmic image can reproduce. The Surrealist inheritance of automatism, extended into seasonal and ecological registers, provides a reflective space to give attention to the irreproducible. Fig. 5: animal interventions with River Portal as it dried. The final artwork will be shown at Early Work Gallery Fremantle in November 2025 as part of the Donnelly River Verandah Artist Residencies 2025. Conclusion: The Mantic Stain of Experience In revisiting Surrealist automatism through the lens of female practitioners, it becomes clear that what is most vital in these techniques is not their visual novelty but their experiential depth. Colquhoun’s mantic stain described the blot as a visionary site where accident became revelation. Varo’s layered atmospheres and Carrington’s metamorphic narratives likewise foregrounded experience as a collaboration between artist, material, and world. Together, these women expanded Breton’s model of automatism beyond psychology into realms of ritual, ecology, and lived encounter. My own seasonal practice continues this lineage. Working in alignment with cosmic and seasonal thresholds, I allow planetary rhythms, atmospheric conditions, and environmental interventions to co-author the work. In such gestures, experience becomes the true medium: light, season, river water, pigment, and chance converge to form artworks that are residues of encounter—irreducibly tied to their moment of becoming. In a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by algorithmic reproducibility, such practices insist on art’s singularity. They remind us that texture is not merely visual but also tactile and temporal, and that aura resides not in image alone but in the convergence of world, body, and season. The stain, the scratch, the shadow: these are not signs to be imitated, but temporal markers of encounter that cannot be simulated. To speak of the mantic stain of experience is to affirm Surrealist automatism as a living practice—embodied, ecological, and entangled—a site where material, temporal, and relational forces coalesce. Barad’s notion of intra-action clarifies why this presence resists replication: automatist processes materialise through entanglement, co-producing artist, image, and environment within the moment of becoming. Against repetition and reproducibility, such works insist on presence, revealing art not as a static product but as an unfolding event—a singular act of becoming in which the world itself participates. Acknowledgment I acknowledge the Nyungar people as the traditional custodians of the land on which I make Art and pay my deepest respect to their enduring culture and elders past and present. References Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1969. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217–52. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Dover, 1998. Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1969. ———. “Prolégomènes à un troisième manifeste du surréalisme ou non.” Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. University of Michigan Press, 1969. 281–2. Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. Thames and Hudson, 1991. Colquhoun, Ithell. “The Mantic Stain.” Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont. Austin: U of Texas P, 1998. 220–4. Crawford, Kate. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale UP, 2021. Mahon, Alyce. The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2020. Matheson, Neil. “The Surrealist Novel and the Gothic.” A History of the Surrealist Novel. Ed. Anna Watz. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2023. 121–36. Noheden, Kristoffer. Animals and Ecology in the Surrealist Novel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Norris, Katy. “Between Worlds.” Tate Etc. 64 (Winter 2024). 4 Oct. 2025 . Ross, Clifford, ed. Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics. New York: Abrahams, 1990. Susik, Abigail. Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021. Watz, Anna, ed. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2021. Zeller, Robert. New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting. New York: Monacelli Studio, 2023.

Don’t Start from Here There is a joke that has been told many times, of a traveller who asks a local for directions. The local starts to describe the path and then, after some consideration, tells the traveller ‘if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’. While a good storyteller can deliver this tale with a cadence that evokes laughter, there is a naïve wisdom to the advice. The journey requires a different approach. Our culture of ever-present online media has removed many rituals of access. The news is no longer at 6pm ending with the weather or a feel-good story. Online media have enabled new forms of presenting current events – from the immediacy of phone edits of condensed information. Being overwhelmed, going down rabbit holes, feeling unsatisfied, and doomscrolling are now common experiences. The ever-present access to content makes more pertinent our habits of engagement and how we build meaning. My practice involves making experiences, most often installations with holographic and interactive elements that require you, the viewer, to move to explore the imagery. When I can entice you to find and explore a holographic image, the agency and action of your embodied perspective shapes the scene. The presence of a virtual image of light is materially connected to your perspective. The encounter can feel strange, your assumptions are dislodged, and new connections emerge. The screens of interactive experiences present a more familiar visual experience. While digital coding allows for endless relationships to manipulate the imagery, to trigger interaction requires establishing a sense of feedback. When successful, these participatory art experiences enable insight into perceptual awareness and spark activities that involve both learning (if I do this, that happens) and creativity (what if I try?). My provocation is that approaching the media encounter as adventure provides a framework to design for the transformative experiences of learning and creativity. What Is an Adventure? An adventure often combines aspects of the known and unknown where we are driven or guided by abstract knowledge such as a map, narrative, mission, or question. In the act of adventuring, this abstract knowledge becomes part of the experience. Through choices and effort what unfolds is a discourse between known relations, predictions, and feedback. Adventure implies that the outcome is yet to be known and the process is open to co-design. Fig. 1: I followed a box of matches to the Halászbástya but it was under construction, 2008. Postcard from the Halászbástya (Fisherman’s Bastion), Budapest, Magyarország. 200-frame hologram animation, achromatic transmission recording on film with metal mirror, 28 x 38 cm. Enfolded Light exhibition catalogue, 2013. A Map, Story or Image Often Sparks a Journey, But Once We Embark, How Do These Layers Shape Our Experience? For my artwork, when I capture image sequences and video, I am tracing relationships between visual elements, my movement, and concepts. Looking through my phone screen to make a recording dislodges my embodied sense as I move with and through the image. To engage within media augmentation can be disorientating. It is an experience that extends the feedback of embodiment to bring the abstract into reality. My art practice explores perceptual shaping, which I seek to express through poetic encounters. Engaging with new knowledge and ways of thinking is another form of extended experience. To learn requires getting beyond what you are already comfortable with. As an educator, producer, and artist, my role is to invite and guide people into the unfamiliar. The experiences I create ask you to push through discomfort and explore. Not Looking. As a curator for the Center for the Holographic Arts and as an artist, I’ve presented numerous exhibitions of art holograms around the world. These exhibitions included audiences who were encountering the embedded dimensional imagery of holograms for the first time. To launch the new digital and performing arts space, MAP mima (Lake Arts Precinct, Awabakal Country), I arranged to borrow a series of holograms by August Muth. These artworks are gorgeous glass-work slabs imbued with opalescent colours and holographic shapes that can be multiplied by the lighting. Fig. 2: August Muth’s hologram installed in the foyer of MAP mima, 2022. While working in the foyer near these artworks I observed adults actively resist looking at the imagery. On multiple occasions adults would glance at the holographic images and then actively avoid engaging. On more than one occasion a child tried to get their adult to look at the hologram and was hurried away as if it was dangerous. Was It Too Confronting to Explore the Unknown? Or Was It a Fear That the ‘Knowing Adult’ May Be Asked to Explain What They Were Looking At? Producing arts experiences for diverse audiences requires reaching out to hesitant visitors, providing a connection to access the experience. At holographic media exhibitions there are some visitors who want to know ‘how does this work?’ before they engage with the content. Other common connections are made through guides – both invigilators and mimicking the actions of other visitors – and through understanding the process and intentions through which the artist(s) created the work. With my artwork and its installation, I give clues that reveal aspects of the process and the embedded dynamics. To see the hologram, first you need to be physically located in the viewing field and then move within this field to play the animation. It is not intuitive and on first encounter with one of my animated holographic artworks you may be uncertain about what you are seeing. Ambiguity: Dislodging Assumptions to Create New Meaning In the early twentieth century the photographic image was reshaping our visual relationship with the world and art became more abstract. Perhaps the confidence of photographic vision enabled new visual languages that spoke through feelings, perception, and gesture. As Viktor Shklovsky describes in the 1917 essay “Art as Device”, “the purpose of art, then, is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition” (6). He argues for a process of defamiliarisation to break habitual automatisation, and that art in doing this enables us to experience the process of creativity (5–6). Shklovsky’s use of the Russian word ostranenie – making strange – coined the photographic movement of capturing unusual perspectives of the everyday to create an ambiguous pictorial space Unresolved perception can be considered as analogous to what physics describes as a quantum superposition, where multiple states coexist simultaneously until observation forces a resolution. Once an image is resolved, it is hard to grasp what was seen before or the dynamic process of establishing perception. Ostranenie stretches the process of resolving, and with this offers an awareness of our active role in the visual experience. Exploring the Holographic Gaze My urban landscape holograms are made from hundreds of montaged photos and video clips mapped into a spatial animation. They are images from exploring cities where the capture process explores the patterns and dynamics of my movement through and conception of place. In many of these artworks you see the photographer – a protagonist of the visual, who establishes relationships with and within the scene. In some compositions the protagonist looks into the camera – at us viewing, and then into the scene which we are viewing with them. This switching of gaze brings an awareness to our own looking and the assembled relationships. Fig. 3: Paternoster, 2006. 200-frame vertical hologram animation that moves through three vast landscapes from within an open face elevator. Reflection print on glass, 40 x 30cm. Photographic, lens-based imagery suggests a relationship between visual activities. The camera locates perspective while the hologram provides a window of view. My holographic scenes fragment this window to structure the composition around attention and movement. Your looking is extended through these relationships. While the term hologram means ‘whole’ image, the process of making animated prints is limited by the optical recording system, the aperture of our eye, and the hologram surface ‘window’ of the print. Many of my holograms were recorded on 30 x 40cm film with 200 views/frames across them, creating a field of view that you can reach by swaying from side to side without stepping. To bring a dynamic of urban exploring to this limited viewing field, I seek patterns that compress and highlight movement and relationships. The act of walking (and riding my bike) while looking through a camera augments my orientation and sense of body. Reflections and lens distortions amplify this experience of extended embodiment. To squeeze in more movement, I often make holograms with vertical animation. The animation can be faster as both eyes intersect the same vertical field/frame, and the motion of viewing is proprioceptively intense. Experiencing these holograms, the imagery attaches to your awareness of gravity. Installing holograms so that you look down or up heightens your awareness of gravity and balance. A vertiginous affect is transmitted through both the imagery and the choreography of viewing. You feel an acceleration emanating from your movement. Fig. 4: Left:On the Roof, 2010. Two-colour transmission 200-frame animation laminated to a laser-etched plexiglass, 38 x 49 cm. Right: Down from the Peak, 2009. Achromatic transmission 200-frame multiplex hologram laminated to plexiglass, 38 x 49 cm. Holographic Desire Referencing the unfamiliar to proprioception brings the abstract into the body, while motivation and desire can involve an abstract provocation for the body to seek experience. One desire I encounter in my practice is for digital media and immersive experiences to be holographic, for imagery to transcend the screen. Built on sci-fi and pop-culture representations of holograms that often go beyond our physics, this speculative imagery and narrative shapes research and practice. What is fundamentally appealing is that holographic media can create a sense of presence. Traditionally this occurs in two main ways: the virtual presence of a person or object – Princess Leia’s message to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars; and being located within a virtual environment – the Holodeck in Star Trek. My interest in holographic imagery seeks an alternative experience where virtual presence is elicited as a relationship to our movement and activity of perception. Resonant Experience Concurrent to exploring the activity of perception through the capture and exhibition of holograms, I experiment with participatory design for art experiences. For the 2006 Next Wave Festival, in partnership with the Commonwealth Games, my sister Alice and I created a comic book adventure game. The narrative weaves across the festival as two characters explore the city and discuss quantum physics. The comic book has frames and text missing. Participants were guided to festival sites where stickers could be collected in ‘wave packets’ to complete or ‘collapse’ the narrative. Participants also received a speech bubble badge, so they could recognise each other and trade possible stories. Fig. 5: Photo of a participant who arranged their stickers to allow all three text options. Alice + Martina Mrongovius, The wave collapses, 2006. Comic book adventure game, 2006 Next Wave Festival, Melbourne, Australia. For this project we considered the structure of adventure as an augmented game layer across the festival and connected to physical locations and temporal events. How the story unfolds as well as which DJ and what art accompanies your experience was a combination of collecting stickers, the chance of what was in a packet, and your choice of which stickers to include. This structure enabled participants to engage with an awareness of quantum physics through the text and the experience. Onboarding In these very different examples of engaging with art, a key part of the design was how to establish the expectations of participation. To experience artwork and entice creative practice I seek to evoke a sense of adventure where participants take agency for their experience. Onboarding is a feature of museum experiences (von der Borch 17) and gaming. The tools and familiar culture of each offer strategies to emergent media, non-conventional game play, and creative education. In-game-driven media onboarding includes learning interaction controls. Character choice and the personalisation of an avatar can extend our identity into the adoption of this virtual interaction. Onboarding also establishes motivation (why go exploring?). Is there something to uncover, can something be made, are there rewards or is something broken? When the participants want to find, fix, acquire, or create they are seeking something new. Challenges, puzzles, and obstacles are expected. More Guides With my own artwork, I use suggestive architecture and objects that are imbued with interaction to guide you into the hologram's viewing field and to move to play the embedded animation. Staircases position people, elicit vertical motion, and heighten spatial awareness. Holding a railing can add another connection to the architecture and help anchor fast and/or vertiginous animation. Fig. 6: Left: we’re all looking, 2007. Hologram series with office wheely chairs to position the viewers and coax movement, Beyond the Window, Bus gallery, Melbourne, 2008. Centre: Up the Stairs, 2010. Hologram series installed for MiniusEins im Exil, Sommerloch Festival, Elba Villa, Wuppertal, 2010. Right: A spiral staircase was in the gallery for The Emergent Holographic Scene. PostX, Belgium, 2011, with view from the top, looking down into This morning on the balcony reminded me of a dream, 2010. Invigilation and mimicry are direct ways to guide participation. Waves of interaction occur with media architecture installations in public space as people learn from each other how to play. In Relational Architecture, defined by the media installations of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, the interaction between people is integral to the artwork. With Jumping Jellyfish the trampoline guides interaction and the artwork also becomes a performance piece: you watch people be a jumping jellyfish. And in turn you receive the reassurance of social proof to also participate. Fig. 7: Jumping Jellyfish, 2009. Installation view, Enfolded Light, LEHRTER SIEBZEHN, Berlin, November 2013. An invigilator of art can guide you into the experience and holds knowledge of the work. At the Museum of Art and Culture yapang, the volunteer tour guides wove a living dialogue through the exhibitions. The guides researched upcoming exhibitions and learnt stories directly from the artists and curators. Over the duration of an exhibition, as I crossed the gallery to my office out the back, I would catch this dialogue. The artwork became an anchor for sharing stories. The choice of when to follow a guide and when to explore gives participants another dynamic through which to shape their adventure. During COVID in New York, when we could not have invigilators in the gallery, I started creating audio guides using the Gesso App. The audio guide I produced for the HoloCenter’s Edge of Light (Culture Lab LIC, 2020) went beyond solving a problem to create a better experience. The artist’s voice is with you, as you are within the light installation that they created. This intimacy was enhanced by the distancing of COVID restrictions. Removing text from the wall, or room sheet, also encouraged visitors to move around the light installation and keep their visual attention with the artworks. Learning from this experience, I collaborated to develop a sound trail as part of the MAC yapang Sculpture Park revitalisation. This ongoing project aims to enable a connection across time by layering stories and sounds into Country. Using the Sound Trails platform, the sound fields are anchored to artworks using geo-location. A musical score by Adam Manning is layered after and between story sites. The experience invites you into a living archive shaped by Aboriginal knowledge holders and artists. We intentionally do not tell you where to go or how long to stay; the soundscape is part of being with this place. Connection, intimacy, and deep time emerged in these experiences because they were designed with a sense of adventure. The Adventurer To approach a situation as an adventure is to consider that your actions have the potential to affect your surroundings and are a catalyst for your experience. When we adventure through virtually connected structures, the impact of agency and observation (awareness and attention) co-create an experiential map. We explore and our presence shapes the unfolding of what comes next to create our experienced reality. In language and laws of quantum physics and information theory, John Wheeler describes this as a participatory universe (33). The act of observation anchors possibilities to co-emerging reality and consciousness. Personalised algorithms have made us very aware of resonant thinking and conceptual rabbit-holes. The endless fascination and immediate response of engaging with AI can be addictive, but this engagement becomes hollow without a narrative-map or anchored experience. In the hilarious and insightful article, “We’re All the Main Character Now: Designing for the Era of Experiential Narcissism”, Lou Pizante describes the growing trend of immersive experiences designed around making participants feel like the narrative revolves around them (1). While anchoring experience to the participant encourages agency, a further scaffold is required to give direction and meaning. Mapping We touch maps, and the wear patterns show how we connect embodied and conceptual thinking. Here where we are, and here on the map. Fig. 8: Photo from Long Island City in the New York Subway, showing people touching their location on the map and where they are heading, with four views of Emotions for the seaside, 2004/5. 200-frame hologram animation that spins through 360 degrees. Enfolded Light exhibition catalogue, 2013. The act of placing a finger on a map is an action that connects the concept of place to the embodied experience of it. This connection of information into place or objects has a long history that spans Indigenous knowledge practices and Greek memory palaces, as Lynn Kelly explores in “The Memory Code”. Our physical environment becomes part of our cognition. While place can hold memories, setting out to explore offers an opportunity to build new structures of conceptualising. The experience of location augmented through dynamic digital maps endlessly positions us at the centre of the map, while physical maps suggest a movement across them. This shift in navigation has changed how we conceptualise and plan journeys. Virtual worlds such as video games are layered with maps and navigation aids, which for the most part reference physical movement through space. With abstraction and by limiting the range of virtual terrain, interactive media art offers an opportunity to experiment with how we navigate and map systems. Again, how connections are built between the known and unknown becomes a design question. Navigation and Perturbation Orientation and augmentation shape the encounter through locating and extending the experience. Navigation is a recursive referencing of knowledge to experience. A responsive structure enables the interaction to activate our own unfolding. Peter Putnam’s theory of cognition suggests that learning is the result of finding ways to reconnect or return from perturbations of our neural state (30). His model considers sensations and information inputs that shift perception from which we seek / figure / connect back to what we know, and doing so learn and create new neural pathways. Our perception, developed through prior experience, is used to evaluate new experience. This enables the recursive growth of knowing and learning. When interactive systems introduce calculated friction or cognitive perturbations, users must actively figure their way back, thereby forming new cognitive maps and deeper engagement. Integration of the unexpected or accidental – a found book, a suggestion of a friend, or an encounter with strange art – becomes a potential for learning. With the navigation and mapping of experiences, we build intelligence. The Journey Is the Destination Emerging digital media draw on games, film, art, and AI to bring multi-dimensional narratives into interactive experiences. AI, personalised algorithms, and online gaming enable faster and more complex networks of interaction. The design and navigation of these experiences include techniques used for composing a holographic scene. Relationships are hinged by anchors and structures of engagement are mapped. When we design for adventure and value the journey, transformation is a process rather than result. From education to entertainment, what is then sought, or purchased, is an opportunity for engagement. As we adventure with media structures, conceptualisation occurs between us and the encoded activity to create a new shared experience. What interests me is how emergent media experiences shape our movement and engagement with public space. I moved to Perth, Boorloo, in Western Australia to explore the media architecture experience of Edith Cowan University’s new screen-laden city campus. With a sense of adventure, my aim is to weave connection and shape experience through activities of collaborative composition. In the process of making I use mapping as a tool to establish shared narratives and provide a reference from which to structure various ideas. Returning An adventure takes us into the unknown, equipped with a narrative, map, or guide. On the way we are likely to feel dislocated as what we expect gets shifted by what we find. In the process of connecting these experiences into our familiar understanding we have built new paths, new ways of knowing. The iterative process of extending and connecting is an enacted creativity, and through this activity we learn. Holographic and interactive media have the potential to express the activity of perception. They are systems within which a mapping of relationships can be explored, by the artist/designer and participant. Experience is extended through interaction, with and within the system. To design for adventure gives participants agency to explore while being supported by maps and guides. References Gefter, Amanda. “Finding Peter Putnam: The Forgotten Janitor Who Discovered the Logic of the Mind.” Nautilus, 17 June 2025. 22 July 2025 . Kelly, Lynne. The Memory Code: The Traditional Aboriginal Memory Technique That Unlocks the Secrets of Stonehenge, Easter Island and Ancient Monuments the World Over. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2016. Mrongovius, Martina. The Emergent Holographic Scene: Compositions of Movement and Affect Using Multiplexed Holographic Images. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2011. . ———. Shaping and Weaving the Lake Arts Precinct. 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art, Brisbane (Meanjin), 21–29 June 2024. . Mrongovius, Alice, and Martina Mrongovius. The Wave Collapses. Melbourne: BanditFox, 2006. Pizante, Lou. “We’re All the Main Character Now: Designing for the Era of Experiential Narcissism.” blooloop, 24 July 2025. 28 July 2025 . Putnam, Peter. “Outline of a Functional Model of the Operation of the Nervous System.” The Peter Putnam Papers, 1963. 25 June 2026 . Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Dalkey Archive P, 1991. Von der Borch, Claudia. “Museum Experiential Design: Immersive Techniques and Approaches.” International Specialised Skills Institute, 2024. 24 July 2025 . Wheeler, John Archibald. “Genesis and Observership.” Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences. Eds. Robert E. Butts and Jaakko Hintikka. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1977. 3–33.

In recent research conducted by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority on the depiction of older people in advertising, participants repeatedly described advertising as something they approached with “a pinch of salt” (ASA 25). Adverts were recognised as exaggeration, shorthand, or even performance. They were not expected to be realistic or especially credible; and yet, the same participants returned again and again to a small set of familiar images of later life. Charity appeals framed by loneliness and adverts for funerals, care services, and end‑of‑life planning. Representations that drifted between crisis and idealisation. Individually, these portrayals were easy to dismiss, but their persistence made them harder to ignore. Across interviews and focus groups, the ASA found that repeated exposure mattered less because people believed what they saw, and more so because the same depictions recurred across time, platforms, and product categories. Over time, the report cautions, these patterns could begin to shape how ageing is understood and felt, not through persuasion or realism, but through familiarity and emotional repetition. This finding is noteworthy because it emerges at a moment when advertising increasingly frames itself as the design of experience rather than the delivery of messages. Within contemporary branding and advertising discourse, value is often described in experiential terms, with brands expected to generate memorable encounters rather than convey information. That orientation now operates within advertising environments shaped by optimisation and automation. Creative decisions are increasingly informed by data, performance modelling, and platform logics, favouring formats that are emotionally legible, efficient, and repeatable (Rudnick). Experience, in this context, is no longer treated as something that happens after an advert is seen. It is structured in advance and designed to circulate. These developments raise a critical question: if advertising now prioritises the design of emotionally recognisable experiences, what happens to cultural phenomena that do not resolve quickly, do not stabilise easily, and do not lend themselves to clear affective cues? Ageing offers a particularly revealing case. As both a growing demographic and a desirable consumer market, older people are highly visible in certain types of advertising and strikingly absent in others (Olsen and Scott). When later life does appear on screen, it is often framed through a narrow emotional register that privileges recognition over ambiguity and decisiveness over duration. Advertising does not simply depict ageing, it helps define how later life is expected to feel. This article examines how ageing is constructed as a mediated experience in three recent UK television advertising campaigns: If Only You Knew (Age UK, 2023), #LastLonelyMenopause (TENA, 2022), and Feel Good (Age Co, 2024). These campaigns differ in tone and intent, yet all exemplify how contemporary advertising curates later life through affective design under conditions of automation and optimisation. They point to a constrained set of emotional forms through which later life is made intelligible within advertising systems shaped by efficiency, coherence, and circulation. Theoretical Framework: Experience, Automation, and the Representation of Ageing This article treats experience not as an interior or purely subjective state, but as something actively produced through media form, design practice, and systems of circulation. In television advertising, experience takes shape through coordinated decisions around form, pacing, imagery, and affect, with ageing organised as a meaningful and emotionally legible condition rather than a neutral life stage. Advertising has long functioned as a system for organising experience because it invites identification rather than detached observation. As Leiss and colleagues argue, advertising operates as a set of communicative intermediaries, forming “patterned systems of meaning” (182) through which social life is made intelligible. In this account, advertising is not a supplementary cultural practice but a central institution concerned with organising consumption activity and with making objects, persons, and situations “come alive” (181) within staged social interactions. This process is particularly significant for ageing, which is rarely left ambiguous in advertising but is animated through specific emotional cues, gestures, and narrative framings. Treating experience as something that can be deliberately produced aligns with what Pine and Gilmore describe as the experience economy. As they argue, “the best way to generate demand for any offering in today’s experience economy is with an experience so engaging that customers can’t help but pay attention and buy that offering” (42). What matters here is not the promotional ambition of this claim, but its underlying assumption that experience can be intentionally shaped and made to work. Once experience is understood in these terms, it becomes open to design decisions concerning pacing, intensity, duration, and emotional clarity. Television advertising operates squarely within this logic, albeit in compressed form. Campaigns stage micro‑experiences in which affect, tone, and interpretation must be established quickly and clearly. Within this experience‑oriented logic, it is important to distinguish between experience design and affective design. Experience design refers to the orchestration of narrative, sensory, and temporal elements that structure how an encounter unfolds. Affective design, as used here, describes an increasingly explicit orientation towards emotional calibration within advertising practice. Donald Norman’s work on emotional design is instructive in this respect. Norman argues that “products and systems that make you feel good are easier to deal with” (7), emphasising that affect often precedes conscious interpretation and functions as a mode of judgement. Affect, in this sense, is not a by‑product of storytelling but something designers actively work with. Within contemporary media cultures, affective legibility and emotional clarity increasingly operate as normative values, privileging recognisable feelings over ambiguity or contradiction (Döveling, Harju, and Sommer; Paasonen). In advertising, narrative, performance, editing, sound, and delivery are selected not simply for expressiveness, but for emotional legibility. The emotional arc of a campaign is therefore rarely incidental. It is calibrated across audiences and platforms, with later life staged through familiar affective positions such as vulnerability, recovery, reassurance, or affirmation. These framings can appear personal or empathetic, while simultaneously reinforcing culturally familiar emotional scripts about ageing (Featherstone and Wernick). What is at stake is not only representation, but the narrowing of how ageing is allowed to feel. These affective strategies are increasingly shaped by automated and semi‑automated production environments. Contemporary advertising workflows rely on script templates, modular narrative structures, editing presets, and performance guidelines that standardise emotional expression. Automation here does not refer solely to artificial intelligence, but to broader infrastructural conditions in which experience is increasingly computed, tested, and iterated, shaping not only how advertising is delivered but how affective experience itself is designed (Andrejevic; McStay). These systems influence which bodies are shown, how they move, and how they are positioned within emotional and narrative frames (Lury). Although much of this automation remains invisible on screen, its effects are evident in production practice. Platforms such as QuickFrame and Runway enable advertisers to calibrate tone, pacing, and visual style with precision, while direct‑response television campaigns rely on templated scripting and modular frameworks that optimise emotional arcs for circulation across platforms. Creativity is not eliminated, but embedded within systems that privilege emotional efficiency and recognisability. Applied to representations of ageing, these design logics constrain the emotional range through which later life is publicly articulated. While diversity and inclusion have become prominent branding values, the affective scaffolding through which later life is presented often remains narrow. Older bodies are repeatedly positioned within familiar emotional templates of resilience, vulnerability, or aspiration, with limited space for ambivalence or contradiction (Gilleard and Higgs; Olsen and Scott). Ageing becomes culturally intelligible, but only within carefully managed affective boundaries. Methodological Note Adopting a qualitative, interpretive approach, this article is rooted in critical media analysis. The selected case studies were examined through close textual and aesthetic reading, with attention to narrative structure, affective design, and the organisation of experience within contemporary advertising formats. Drawing on theories of experience design, affect, and cultural ageing, the analysis foregrounds how advertising produces emotional legibility and embodied meaning rather than simply representing later life. The campaigns were chosen for their cultural prominence, thematic relevance, and diversity of tone, enabling comparative analysis of how ageing is rendered across different branding contexts. This approach allows for a system‑level reading of advertising texts, tracing how automated and pre‑structured production logics shape the kinds of experiences of later life that advertising can readily accommodate. Case I: Age UK, If Only You Knew (2023) Fig. 1: Age UK, If Only You Knew (2023). Stills from one of three parallel storylines in the campaign. The screenshots illustrate the advert’s shift from everyday routine to sudden vulnerability. Age UK’s If Only You Knew campaign stages ageing through an affective structure that presents itself as social realism while being tightly engineered for emotional impact. Drawing on helpline data and first‑person testimony (Age UK), the advert organises the experience of ageing around a single moment of rupture that reshapes how the viewer is asked to feel. It opens with scenes of everyday normality. Older people move through familiar domestic routines, framed in warm light and set to The Tams’ “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy”. The mood reassures. Autonomy and ordinariness are foregrounded, sometimes shading into contentment. Ageing appears managed and socially unremarkable. The pace remains slow, the affect muted, urgency absent. Then the interruption arrives. The music stops. The screen darkens. The lights go off. Vulnerability enters through shock rather than accumulation, collapsing normality into precarity within seconds. Instead of relying on the slow build of social detail, recognition is compressed into an instant. The power cut renders hardship visible all at once, turning structural deprivation into a perceptual event that demands feeling before interpretation. Emotional clarity is achieved quickly, well within the constraints of the television format. Yet this efficiency also raises questions. What forms of ageing become visible only when crisis is staged as revelation? Which experiences remain affectively indistinct because they unfold gradually, lack spectacle or resist translation into rupture? Everyday constraint, persistent anxiety and slow decline struggle to register without such dramaturgical force. The aesthetic grammar of hardship reinforces this economy. Dim lighting, worn interiors, withdrawn gestures operate as immediate cues of distress, functioning less as social texture than as affective signals. As Leiss and colleagues observe, advertising animates meaning through staged interaction rather than sustained complexity. Ageing becomes legible here through a narrow but effective visual and emotional vocabulary. The emotional arc follows a familiar charity template, moving decisively from reassurance to urgency through pacing and sound rather than argument. Ethical intent remains intact, but interpretation is minimised. The older subject occupies a double position. On screen, they appear as individuals whose hardship warrants recognition. Within the logic of experience design, they function as affective proxies through which urgency and responsibility circulate. Ageing becomes visible only once it disrupts the surface of normality, a form of immediacy well suited to pre‑structured narrative arcs and compressed affective cues characteristic of contemporary advertising production. Case II: TENA, #LastLonelyMenopause (2022) Fig. 2: TENA, #LastLonelyMenopause (2022). Screenshots from the advert highlighting the intergenerational mirroring that structures the campaign’s representation of menopause and later‑life embodiment. TENA’s #LastLonelyMenopause campaign approaches later‑life femininity through recognition rather than disruption, relying on alignment as its central affective mechanism. Menopause becomes emotionally legible through mirroring with a more culturally familiar bodily transition. The advert follows a mother and daughter across domestic scenes, cutting between the daughter’s experience of puberty and the mother’s experience of menopause. Time does not advance. Two life stages sit side by side, establishing an immediate affective bridge. Menopause appears intelligible because it is placed next to a transition viewers already understand. There is no requirement to learn a new emotional language. Instead, menopause is translated into an existing one. Mirroring stabilises affect. Puberty carries a familiar emotional grammar shaped by confusion, embarrassment, bodily adjustment and social self‑consciousness. Aligning menopause with these affects reduces uncertainty and softens disruption, allowing recognition to arrive quickly and with little resistance. Empathy emerges without requiring menopause to stand on its own terms as an autonomous or unsettling experience in later life. The tone that results is intimate but contained. Close‑ups and quiet voiceovers foreground interiority, while montage limits prolonged dwelling. Affect circulates between mother and daughter, producing continuity across the life course. Bodies change, but the emotional script holds. Such stability reflects an experience‑design logic in which coherence and reassurance take precedence over surprise or disruption (Pine and Gilmore). Emotional intelligibility is secured through selective amplification, intensifying certain feelings while allowing ambiguity or contradiction to recede (Paasonen). Within this framework, menopause becomes publicly legible not by asserting its specificity, but by being translated into a familiar emotional form that can be readily processed and circulated. Yet this familiarity imposes constraints. Anchoring menopause to puberty risks flattening the specificity of later‑life embodiment, while also presuming a normative life course structured around intergenerational continuity. What kinds of menopausal experience become speakable only when rendered symmetrical with youth and aligned with familiar patterns of transition? From an affective design perspective, this narrowing is deliberate. Compression and translatability take priority over ambiguity, allowing the campaign to circulate efficiently across audiences and platforms. In doing so, #LastLonelyMenopause performs important cultural work by breaking silence, while simultaneously limiting the emotional range through which menopause can be publicly recognised. Ageing becomes visible by being made familiar. Menopause feels less lonely precisely because it is never allowed to feel fully strange. Case III: Age Co, Feel Good (2024) Fig. 3: Age Co, Feel Good (2024). Selected screenshots from the advert showing the transition from consumer decision to choreographed movement, central to the campaign’s affective resolution. Age Co’s Feel Good campaign completes a different affective movement, operating not through rupture or mirroring but through resolution. The advert is organised around a simple promise: later life should feel good. The narrative centres on Barry, a man in his sixties, who experiences a burst of joy after switching insurance providers. The storyline is stripped back: a phone call is made, a decision follows, the body responds, Barry dances. The emotional transformation occurs quickly and decisively, leaving no residue. The dance functions as the advert’s affective hinge, visually confirming that the transaction has succeeded both financially and emotionally. Joy becomes evidence. The choreography remains playful and controlled, framed within the domestic interior. It reads as familiar and repeatable: rhythm holds, movement begins, music swells, feeling resolves. Cause and effect collapse into a single gesture. Care appears complete and anxiety recedes. The emotional arc closes cleanly, offering the viewer a sense of completion rather than reflection. From an experience‑design perspective, this structure is highly optimised. Pine and Gilmore describe memorable experiences as coherent and closed, and Feel Good adheres closely to that logic. The experience does not unfold gradually; it lands. Resolution presents itself as self‑evident, yet this clarity carries consequences. Joy is conditional, triggered by correct consumer behaviour. Emotional uplift follows from making the right choice, modelling when happiness should occur and how it should be earned. Later life emerges as a space where good feelings are produced through ethical and rational consumption. This framing raises further questions, such as what happens to emotions that do not resolve neatly, that linger or return, or that resist closure? Ambivalence, ongoing worry, and uncertainty find little space here, while feelings that fail to close risk appearing as personal failure rather than lived experience. Within this modular emotional arc, automation shapes this logic. The dance can be trimmed and redeployed across platforms without losing its meaning. Joy functions almost like a preset, calibrated through timing, framing, and performance. In contrast to crisis and recognition, Feel Good presents ageing as solved. Vulnerability remains implied but largely bypassed. What ultimately matters is the feeling at the end. Synthesis: Affective Templates and Automated Experience Design Across the three campaigns, ageing emerges as an affective experience shaped by a narrow but powerful set of design logics. The campaigns reveal recurring patterns through which emotional experience is structured, stabilised, and made readily recognisable within contemporary advertising practice. These patterns can be understood as affective templates. Rupture, mirroring, and resolution function in this way, organising how later life is rendered emotionally intelligible across otherwise distinct campaigns. These templates do not simply reflect creative preference or genre variation. They respond to institutional pressures to produce experiences that are immediately legible, emotionally decisive, and capable of circulating efficiently across platforms. Ageing, in this sense, is curated less as a biographical process than as a patterned emotional encounter. These affective templates privilege emotional clarity over emotional depth. Across the three campaigns, recognisability operates as a design goal in its own right, with affect calibrated to feel immediate, intuitive, and appropriate in ways that foreground ease of recognition over reflective complexity. Rupture condenses vulnerability into moments of crisis that demand rapid acknowledgement. Mirroring stabilises later-life experience by translating it into familiar emotional scripts. Resolution offers closure, reassurance, and reward within tightly bounded narrative arcs. These strategies prioritise speed, decisiveness, and completion, while marginalising forms of ageing that unfold slowly, remain ambiguous, or resist narrative containment. What becomes visible is not the full range of later-life experience but those aspects that can be organised into clear affective trajectories. This narrowing reflects broader shifts in experience design within the contemporary media economy. Advertising increasingly operates as an emotional architecture, orchestrating affect through pacing, gesture, sound, and narrative rhythm rather than relying on extended explanation or social realism (Leiss et al.). Experience is produced through staging rather than accumulation. The emphasis on coherence and closure echoes long-standing principles of experience design, in which memorable encounters depend on tightly coordinated elements that arrive at recognisable emotional endpoints (Pine and Gilmore). What distinguishes the current moment is the extent to which these principles are no longer situational or craft-led, but increasingly systematised across production environments. Emotional arcs are now shaped within settings where affective responses are anticipated, tested, and refined through data-driven assumptions about audience behaviour (Rudnick; McStay). Storytelling becomes modular. Emotional beats are stabilised. What ‘works’ is iterated, repeated, and normalised. Within digital affect cultures, recognisability functions as a normative value, reinforced by platform logics that reward rapid comprehension and response (Döveling, Harju, and Sommer). Rupture, mirroring, and resolution are well suited to these conditions. They operate as affective shortcuts that translate complex experiences into forms that can be processed quickly and at scale. The consequences for the representation of ageing are substantial. Embodiment remains central across the campaigns, but it is consistently shaped by the demands of designed experience. Older bodies appear as sites through which affect is activated, stabilised, or resolved, addressing both the on-screen subject and the viewer interpellated through empathy. Ageing is thus organised through a dual experiential logic, operating simultaneously at the level of lived embodiment and mediated perception. Experiences marked by endurance, oscillation, uncertainty, or contradiction remain difficult to accommodate within advertising’s affective economy. The tension that emerges across these campaigns is therefore not between positive and negative images of later life, but between designed experience and lived embodiment. Automation does not displace creativity or ethical intent. It situates both within systems that standardise emotional form and normalise particular ways of feeling. In doing so, these systems do more than shape representation. They participate in setting the affective terms under which ageing can be publicly articulated, recognised, and valued. Conclusion: Advertising, Automation and the Cultural Future of Ageing This article set out to examine how ageing is constructed as experience within contemporary UK television advertising, and how that construction is shaped by automated forms of experience design. Through three analytically situated case studies, it has shown how ageing can be organised through affective templates that render later life emotionally legible, readily circulable, and inclined toward resolution within particular segments of the advertising landscape. These findings do not claim representativeness for advertising as a whole. Rather, they demonstrate how specific design logics operate in contexts where affective clarity, recognition, and completion are prioritised as conditions of effective communication. Viewed in this way, concerns about narrow or repetitive depictions of later life appear less as the product of individual creative failure and more as outcomes of how experience is designed at scale. Contemporary advertising environments favour emotional forms that can move quickly, settle decisively, and circulate with ease. Over time, such forms accumulate, not because they persuade viewers of their realism, but because their familiarity renders them increasingly difficult to ignore. This has direct consequences for how ageing comes to be understood and felt. Later life that unfolds unevenly or resists resolution sits awkwardly within these systems, while experiences that promise recognition, reassurance, or crisis are easier to stabilise and repeat. Advertising does not merely mediate how later life is seen. It participates in defining how later life is expected to feel. This reframing also complicates prevailing industry narratives that position automation primarily as a future-facing advance toward greater autonomy and intelligence. The more consequential transformation identified here is already embedded in everyday production practice, through the routinisation of affective design decisions that pre-structure experience in advance of encounter. These decisions shape not only what kinds of stories about ageing circulate, but how often they do so and in what emotional form. If regulatory concern tends to focus on emotional extremes, and industry discourse celebrates ever more responsive advertising systems, this analysis points to a different critical challenge. Questions of representation must be accompanied by questions of design. Understanding how later life is made feelable within automated media environments is essential for grasping not only what ageing looks like in advertising, but how its emotional contours are being shaped before they reach the screen. References Age Co. “Behind the Scenes of Age Co’s New Feel Good TV Advert.” Age Co, 2024. . Age UK. “New Age UK Research Reveals the Enormous Toll of the Cost of Living Crisis on Many Older People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing.” Age UK, 2023. . Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. Routledge, 2013. ———. “The Big Data Divide.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 1673–89. ASA. “The Depiction of Older People in Ads. Qualitative and Quantitative Research Report.” Advertising Standards Authority, 2025. . Döveling, Katrin, Anu Harju, and Denise Sommer. “From Mediatized Emotion to Digital Affect Cultures: New Technologies and Global Flows of Emotion.” Social Media + Society (2018). Featherstone, Mike, and Andrew Wernick, eds. Images of Ageing: Cultural Representations of Later Life. Routledge, 1995. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. Ageing, Corporeality and Embodiment. Anthem P, 2013. Gilleard, Chris, and Paul Higgs. Cultures of Ageing: Self, Citizen and the Body. Routledge, 2000. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, Jacqueline Botterill, and Kyle Asquith. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace. Routledge, 2018. Lury, Celia. Consumer Culture. Polity, 2011. McStay, Andrew. Digital Advertising. Palgrave, 2016. ———. “Empathic Media and Advertising: Industry, Policy, Legal and Citizen Perspectives (The Case for Intimacy).” Big Data & Society (2016). Norman, Donald. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books, 2004. Olsen, Dennis, and Charlotte Scott. “Golden Years, Wise Mentors and Old Fools: An Updated Typology of Older Characters in British TV Advertising.” Journal of Aging and Social Change 11.2 (2021): 83–94. Paasonen, Susanna. Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media. MIT P, 2021. Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. "The Experience Economy: Past, Present and Future." Handbook on the Experience economy. Edward Elgar, 2013. 21-44. Rudnick, David. “From Automation to Autonomy: Why AI Agents Will Redefine Advertising.” The Drum, 2026. .

Positionality I write as a Brazilian feminist artist and researcher based at Edith Cowan University, whose practice moves between Brazil and Australia, and between the roles of photographer, participant, and subject: I photograph other people, and I also place my own body in the work. My earlier involvement with the collective Maou (“MAOU”), which sought to turn invisible urban spaces into cultural ones, shapes my understanding of art as something made with public space rather than delivered into it. This displacement between cultural frameworks is not merely background to the research; it is the condition from which its central question arises: how identity is held, lost, and remade in the passage between cultural contexts. Introduction My art practice reflects the dynamic interplay between performative acts and the identities they construct, drawing on the philosopher of language J.L. Austin's concept of performative utterances, the philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler's extension of performativity to gender as a series of repetitive acts, and the literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's expansion to broader spatial and cultural frameworks. These theories collectively inform my approach to artmaking, where I navigate gender as fluid and constructed within spatial and relational contexts, challenging traditional notions of gender and advocating for a more unfixed and unstable understanding of identity. In my art practice, I focus on photographing and representing diverse gendered bodies of adult participants within cross-cultural settings, specifically in Brazil and Australia. My work explores how these bodies perform and negotiate their gender identities, paying attention to the intersection of cultural, social, and individual influences that shape fluid and evolving expressions of gender. This approach is vital in feminist art practice, where centring gendered bodies and performance allows for an exploration of the politics of visibility, embodiment, and identity. Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, I critically examine the meaning of gendered embodiment through my photographic choices—pose, framing, and presentation—using gender theory to question identity construction, performance, and perception. This exploration is not only personal but also resonates with broader discourses on gendered bodies, particularly those marked by gender and race. My practice seeks to create a dialogue that extends beyond my individual experience, inviting my audience to consider the political implications of seeing, defining, and engaging with these bodies in art. For instance, in the context of Brazilian feminist art, my work aligns with other artists who centre gendered and racialised bodies in their practice, among them Rosana Paulino's Bastidores (fig. 8) and Priscila Rezende's Bombril (fig. 9). Through these representations, we collectively challenge neoliberal discourses that marginalise and other our bodies, a marginalisation that in Brazil is driven not only by neoliberalism but by an organised nationalist and religious-conservative backlash (Miskolci and Campana 729; Miskolci and Pereira 3). This makes the work feel newly urgent: as gender is made the focus of a moral panic used to justify repressive measures, insisting on the visibility of these bodies on their own terms is, now more than ever, a form of public resistance. Performative Acts: Language, Art, and Identity in My Practice Language philosopher John Langshaw Austin’s speech act theory revolutionised the understanding of language's performative dimension by illustrating how speech acts do not merely describe but enact changes within social contexts. Austin introduced the notion of "performative utterances", which actively alter the social status of the individuals involved (6). These utterances are neither true nor false; their success hinges on appropriate context and societal norms. For example, saying "I promise" creates an obligation, contingent on the conditions within which it is uttered. This concept underscores the power of language to shape social realities through its performative function (Austin 6). This concept of language as an active force rather than a passive reflection parallels my approach to art, where language and cultural symbols play a crucial role. In my practice, which navigates multiple languages and cultural contexts, the use of words and linguistic elements becomes a performative act in itself. For example, my incorporation of Portuguese and English in embroidered hammocks (as shown in fig. 1) is not just an aesthetic choice in my work but a deliberate act of bridging cultural and linguistic divides, reflecting the fluid and dynamic nature of identity as shaped by language and culture. Fig. 1: Patricia Amorim Da Silva. Body Presence Identity, 2023. Projection and embroidery on hammocks. Dimensions variable. Moores Building Contemporary Art Space, Perth. Austin's concept of performatives focusses primarily on how language enacts social realities. Beyond language, its significance for my practice extends to the context of gender identity, where I turn to Butler. Performative Identity: Bridging Butler’s Theory and Artistic Exploration Butler examines the limitations and expansions of Austin's speech act theory in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (first ed.). Butler (15) advocates for a broader perspective that includes socio-historical meanings—the influence of historical context, power dynamics in communication, and cultural norms on the interpretation of speech acts. In Gender Trouble, from Thinking Series, Butler (187) applies Austin's performative utterances to the construction of gender, demonstrating that gender is not an inherent quality but rather a performance shaped by repeated actions and societal expectations—a process Butler (187) terms gender performativity. This insight closely aligns with my own artistic practice, where I challenge fixed notions of identity by employing performative acts such as language, visual representation, and cultural symbols to interrogate and redefine gendered and cultural constructs. Butler's theory suggests that performative acts repeat and enact societal norms, and my work engages with these performatives by reappropriating them in subversive ways (xxix). For instance, I intentionally blur, conceal, and reveal aspects of gender through my use of long-exposure photography or the manipulation of cultural symbols, mirroring the continuous enactment of gender through repeated social performances. These strategies situate my practice within a longer lineage of photographers who have used the medium’s own instabilities—blur, grain, concealment—to unsettle the legibility of the gendered body. Francesca Woodman’s long-exposure self-portraits, in which the moving body dissolves into its surroundings (fig. 2), treat photographic indistinctness as a way of asking where the self begins and ends (Keller). The Japanese Provoke movement of the late 1960s made a related wager through its aesthetic of blurred, fragmented, and materially textured imagery (fig. 3), resisting the documentary impulse that seeks to stabilise, define, and regulate bodies through visual representation (Dufour et al. 243). Read against this history, my long exposures and partial concealments are not isolated effects but part of an ongoing practice in which photographic technique is itself an argument about identity. As demonstrated in fig. 4, the interplay of lighter and darker regions within the image influences the viewer’s interpretation by revealing or concealing various body parts and their surroundings. The face, emerging clearly from the projections, including the chosen projection of a tree, adds layers of meaning and portrays the participant's identity in a nuanced manner. This projection reflects the participant's personal and emotional landscape, with the ancient tree symbolising strength and connection. This approach deepens the viewer’s understanding of the complex interplay between the body and the physical space it inhabits, illustrating how these interactions contribute to the construction and expression of gender identities. Fig. 2: Francesca Woodman. From Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–76. Gelatin silver print. Sheet: 8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4 cm). Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; © Woodman Family Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, https://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/objects/2013.12.2. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). Fig. 3: Daidō Moriyama. Midnight Accident, Tokyo, 1969. Gelatin silver print. 13 × 18 5/8 in. (33.1 × 47.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Gift of the artist), https://www.moma.org/collection/works/56595. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). Fig. 4: Patricia Amorim Da Silva. Untitled series, 2023. Digital photograph. My engagement with these performative acts aligns with Butler's (159) idea that reappropriating such performatives can empower marginalised groups to disrupt and redefine the cultural meanings imposed upon them, challenging existing social structures and creating the potential for new futures through breaks with the past. In the context of my practice, the norms at stake are the binary and racialised conventions that dictate how a gendered body may appear; the futures are the still-unfixed identities these images hold open; and the past being broken from is the documentary tradition that treats the photograph as neutral evidence of a body rather than as a site where identity is actively made. Similarly, my work allows participants to assert control over their own identities: in Video 1, for instance, Orion does so through fluid movements and interactions with the projected images. Video 1: Patricia Amorim Da Silva. Photographic Session, 2023. Video recording. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDLcZLdyvIo. In the performative context, gender is constituted through a series of repeated, stylised actions that create the illusion of stability. Orion's fluid movements and deliberate engagement with the projected images demonstrate a conscious effort to redefine how he is seen. Butler (151) emphasises the significance of repetition in performativity, arguing that it is through repetition, rather than individual agency, that norms take on new meaning—an idea that resonates with my work, where repetition can both reinforce and subvert gender norms. In my practice, identity—like gender—is constructed through ongoing, performative acts that engage with both memory and the body. I explore this dynamic process by projecting images that represent emotional memories onto my own body and the bodies of participants. This act of projection symbolises the fluid and continuous construction of identity, as memories and experiences intertwine with the present self. A key element of my practice involves using a digital photographic archive of these emotional memories, such as images of a childhood home or a significant landscape, which I project onto both participants and myself. I then digitally manipulate the images to create dynamic visual narratives that reflect the evolving nature of identity. In Figure 5, from the (Re)Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats exhibition at Moores Building Contemporary Art Space, the repetition of these memory-based images echoes the performative repetition Butler (51) discusses, allowing for the reconfiguration of identity. The photographs—captured in abandoned locations in Brazil during my time with the artistic collective Maou (“MAOU”) which aimed to transform invisible spaces into cultural ones—demonstrate how personal and cultural identities are continually reshaped through the repetition and reinterpretation of memory and visual imagery. Fig. 5: Patricia Amorim Da Silva. Body Presence Identity, in (Re)Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats, 2023. Projection and embroidery on hammocks; video still. Dimensions variable. Moores Building Contemporary Art Space, Perth. In Video 2, this process becomes deeply personal: depicting my body in water signifies the fluidity of my identity as I navigate diverse cultures and roles, while the repetition of water and embroidery serves as a visual language for my diasporic experience. Positioning my body in the water conveys immersion and adaptability, highlighting my capacity to move between cultural landscapes, constantly reshaping and redefining my identity in each context. Video 2: Patricia Amorim Da Silva. Body Presence Identity, in (Re)Borrowing Arrows with Thatched Boats, 2023. MP4 video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8u1MDgU1R4. The interplay between ephemeral projections and enduring physical elements is central to my work, as it underscores the complex nature of identity. While the projections—an ephemeral medium requiring activation—highlight the fleeting and transformative aspects of memory and identity, physical elements like the hammock offer a more enduring resonance, grounding the work in tangible reality. This duality enriches the experience by merging the transient and the permanent, creating a multifaceted narrative that reflects the evolving nature of identity. In this context, the work takes on added depth as I navigate and reinterpret my identity within an unfamiliar cultural setting. The displacement from my home country introduces an additional layer of complexity, as the convergence of fleeting projections and permanent physical elements becomes a metaphor for how identity is continuously shaped and reshaped through both transient experiences and lasting influences. This multifaceted approach allows for a richer exploration of identity within the new cultural framework, highlighting the intersections of memory, physical presence, and the impact of displacement. I also draw on Butler’s Gender Trouble (first ed.), where they extend the idea of performative acts to encompass the intersectionality of gender, race, and sexuality. Just as my work combines fleeting and permanent elements to reflect the fluidity of identity, Butler's framework of intersecting social constructs reinforces the idea that identity is continually reshaped through complex, interconnected factors. Butler's analysis of drag performances (175) offers a concrete example: by dramatising the gestures through which gender is shaped, drag denaturalises the unity that cultural norms impose on gender roles, showing how performative acts both reflect and disrupt those norms. In her book Who's Afraid of Gender?, Butler (287) extends this argument by discussing how all public declarations are inherently performative. Applying this concept to gender does not imply that gender is solely a choice or a voluntary manifestation of individuality. Rather, the performative nature of publicly claiming one's gender highlights the conditions necessary for an individual's liveability. This understanding of gender performativity resonates with gender studies scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's emphasis on the spatial aspects of performativity, and its place within an ongoing, spatially influenced dialogue that shapes societal norms and individual identities. Queer Performativity and Embodiment Queer performativity, a concept explored by Butler and Sedgwick, challenges traditional notions of identity by framing it as a dynamic and socially constructed performance rather than a fixed attribute. Sedgwick's extension of Butler’s theory in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity broadens the discussion from linguistic performatives to a wider range of embodied behaviours and practices, offering insight into how the experiences of marginalised individuals are represented and how these representations challenge or reinforce existing norms. Within the context of my artistic practice, the intersection of queer performativity with local cultural and political contexts can reveal how artists address and resist societal constraints. The Aos Brados organisation offers a striking example of queer performativity. This group uses cultural activities and events to challenge societal norms surrounding race, gender, and sexuality in Campinas, Brazil. For example, Pedala Bich@ (2012), a performance art event (see fig. 6), incorporates historical and cultural narratives of Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, reclaiming public spaces and engaging in dialogues about urban segregation and cultural heritage. Through these activities, Aos Brados demonstrates how queer performativity can serve as a powerful tool for reshaping public discourse and advocating for social change within the Brazilian context. Fig. 6: Aos Brados. “II Pedala Bich@!! — A Pedala da Diversidade!!”, 2012. Digital photograph. Aos Brados (collective); posted to Facebook. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). In contemporary usage, particularly in gender and cultural studies, performativity is frequently associated with the idea of theatrical performance. Butler's (177) work is pivotal here, inviting us to consider gender not as a fixed identity but as a socially constructed “act” that is intentional and performative. The term “performative” has a dual connotation: it can denote both a theatrical quality and a lack of direct reference to an external reality. In a deconstructive sense, performativity can signify absorption or the disjunction between signifier and meaning, challenging conventional cause-and-effect relationships. Fig. 7: A. Capela (photographer); Grace Passô (performer). Vaga Carne, 2018. Digital image (production photograph). Embauba Filmes. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). Expanding on the Brazilian context, Grace Passô's Vaga Carne (Loose Flesh) (fig. 7) offers another compelling exploration of identity and representation in contemporary Brazil. Passô uses her work to interrogate societal norms and expectations, particularly through exploring the experiences of black women. Her production challenges viewers to confront the constructed nature of identity through poetic dialogue and visceral physicality. This space of possibility is exemplified by Passô's (7) innovative staging choices, where the only bodied presence is a solo female voice. By transforming the stage into a space of possibility, Passô (7) invites viewers to confront and reconsider the performative nature of identity, echoing Butler's call for a reevaluation of fixed identities as intentional and performative acts. Other Brazilian artists extend this interrogation of the racialised body. Rosana Paulino’s Bastidores (fig. 8) stitches archival photographs of Black women into embroidery hoops, exposing the violence of their historical framing, while Priscila Rezende’s performance Bombril (fig. 9) uses the artist’s own hair to confront racist stereotypes. Paulino does not frame her practice as feminist; I invoke it here for its address to race and representation rather than to absorb it into that category. Fig. 8: Rosana Paulino. Bastidores, 1997. Mixed media installation. Rosana Paulino, https://rosanapaulino.com.br. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). Fig. 9: Priscila Rezende. Bombril. Performance, 2010. Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, New York University, https://hemisphericinstitute.org/pt/hidvl-collections/item/3620-bombril.html. Reproduced under ss40, 103C Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) (exception: research or study). Conclusion To understand how these frameworks collectively impact on the construction and performance of identities, particularly concerning gender, Austin's (6) account of performative utterances shows how language does not only describe but actively performs actions within social contexts; building on this, Butler (187) expands performativity beyond language to the bodily acts and cultural practices that constitute gender identity, arguing that gender is a repeated, ritualised performance rather than an inherent trait. In their later writing, Butler (287) turns to how gender has become a focal point for political anxieties, used to justify repressive measures and to rally support for authoritarian causes. In Brazil, for instance, gender fluidity is often falsely linked to paedophilia and sexual perversity, fuelling panic and opposition to gender education in schools (Miskolci and Campana 729; Miskolci and Pereira 3). This manipulation shows how those in power use gender as a spectre to reinforce patriarchal structures. These theories offer a sophisticated comprehension of the dynamic construction, negotiation, and contestation of identities. They reveal the social and political implications of gender as a performative act and challenge us to reconsider and expand our understanding of identity in the face of ongoing cultural and ideological conflicts. Furthermore, these frameworks invite critical reflections on how language, gestures, and practices participate in the production and regulation of social norms, offering possibilities for resistance and transformation, and advocating for more inclusive and expansive conceptualisations of identity in contemporary society. In my artistic practice, the presence of gendered bodies and performance involves a deliberate interrogation of how bodies are depicted, framed, and understood. By drawing on Butler’s theories, I examine how my positioning—through choices in photographing, framing, and presenting subjects—reflects and constructs identities. This approach not only reshapes the representation of gender but also engages audiences in a dialogue about the politics of identity, demonstrating how artistic practice can serve as a site of critical inquiry into the construction and contestation of gender identity. By integrating these insights into art practice, artists can critically engage with and redefine conventional notions of gender and identity, using theories of performative, performativity, and periperformative as valuable tools to challenge and reshape social norms, ultimately fostering a more inclusive understanding of identity and advocating for meaningful social change. References Amorim Da Silva, Patricia. Body Presence Identity. Projection and embroidery on hammocks. Moores Building Contemporary Art Space, Perth, 2023. ‹https://www.fac.org.au/whats-on/post/reborrowing-arrows-with-thatched-boats›. Aos Brados. “Aos Brados!!” 2002. 15 Apr. 2024 ‹http://aosbrados.blogspot.com›. ———. “II Pedala Bich@!! — A Pedala da Diversidade!!” Facebook, 2012. 15 Apr. 2024 ‹https://www.facebook.com/Aosbradoscps›. Austin, J.L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1962. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. ———. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2024. Capela, A. Vaga Carne. Digital image. Embauba Filmes, 2018. 15 Apr. 2024 ‹https://embaubafilmes.com.br/locadora/vaga-carne/›. Dufour, Diane, et al., eds. Provoke: Between Protest and Performance: Photography in Japan, 1960–1975. Steidl, 2016. “MAOU: Coletivo Quer Aproximar o Artista da Cidade e a Cidade da Arte.” Catraca Livre, 2016. 15 Apr. 2024 ‹https://catracalivre.com.br/carreira/maou-coletivo-quer-aproximar-o-artista-da-cidade-e-a-cidade-da-arte/›. Keller, Corey, ed. Francesca Woodman. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art / D.A.P., 2011. Miskolci, Richard, and Maximiliano Campana. “‘Ideologia de Gênero’: Notas para a Genealogia de um Pânico Moral Contemporâneo.” Sociedade e Estado 32.3 (2017): 725–47. Miskolci, Richard, and Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira. “Quem Tem Medo de Judith Butler? A Cruzada Moral contra os Direitos Humanos no Brasil.” Cadernos Pagu 53 (2018). Moriyama, Daidō. Midnight Accident, Tokyo. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1969. . Passô, Grace. Vaga Carne. Belo Horizonte: Javali, 2018. Paulino, Rosana. Bastidores. Mixed media installation. Rosana Paulino, 1997. 27 July 2026 . Rezende, Priscila. Bombril. Performance. Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, New York University, 2010. 27 July 2026 . Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Woodman, Francesca. From Space 2, Providence, Rhode Island. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1975–6. .

More than any other media interface in our everyday lives, smartphones have been designed to be with us at all times. We carry them around in domestic spaces, check that we have them before leaving the house, and rely routinely on their networked and communicative capacities. In doing so, we handle them in personalised, habitual ways (Hardley, Mobile 4). Their absence can register as discomfort, and we notice when we have left them at home, or they have been misplaced in domestic or public spaces. Yet occasionally we choose this absence deliberately, turning phones off, switching to flight mode, or leaving the house without them, and people often speak of these moments in terms of freedom or liberation. Our collective and individual relationship to smartphones was reworked during COVID-19 lockdowns (Hardley and Richardson, Digital 630), but even so, the smartphone has remained close to the body, snugly tethered to our everyday movements. Twenty years ago, Ito's groundbreaking research into Japanese mobile phone culture described these devices as offering a snug and intimate technosocial tethering, a personal device supporting communications that are a constant, lightweight, and mundane presence in everyday life. (Ito 1) This article revisits Ito's concept of the snug tether, considering how the concept, and the practices it describes, are shifting in an era increasingly marked by distancing from our devices. Here, distancing refers to the deliberate or incidental practices, gestures, and artefacts through which users create physical space between themselves and their smartphones, even as the device remains nearby. Beginning with touchscreen design, which renders the smartphone something close to an extension of the hand, the article then turns to three distinct instances of being distanced from, or without, a smartphone: An example drawn from my longitudinal ethnographic and haptic research with Australian smartphone users, exploring what it feels like to hold, and to be without, a smartphone. "Reading raves" in Amsterdam, which invite participants to trade the morning scroll for group reading on a museum rooftop. The use of distancing strategies and artefacts, such as landline-style accessories. This article concludes by considering these practices in the larger cultural landscape of smartphone bans in Australian schools. The Evolutionary ‘Fit’ of Touchy-Feely Smartphone Design The functionalities of early mobile phones radically reworked freedom and mobility for many people; however, these non-networked mobile phones were limited in what they could offer. The transition from non-networked mobile phones was revolutionised in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone, and the subsequent opening of the App Store in 2008. The first iPhone was a Web-enabled device with a touchscreen, allowing the user to access the Internet with increased mobility, use locative functionalities, haptically engage with the touchscreen, and be part of networked modes of interaction (Richardson 134). It was with the release of the first iPhone that offline and online first converged into a hybrid digital and physical and social layering (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 56), allowing users to enhance their interaction with people and physical space through the touchscreens, apps, and networked capacities (Frith 76). As noted by Mitchell, Foth, and Anastasiu, “a large part of what makes a smartphone 'smart' are its built-in location-based services: its ability to locate and be located” (183). Alongside these geo-locative functionalities, smartphone touchscreens lent themselves to a deep haptic engagement between users and devices. As described by Richardson, the iPhone is specifically created for use with the finger or fingers for multi-touch sensing, and because the screen is a capacitive touchscreen, it depends on electrical conductivity that can only be provided by bare skin. (144) What can be referred to as “touchy-feely” (Paterson 152) renders the smartphone an extension of the human hand. Touch and the heightened presence of others are offered through the touchscreen where users co-ordinate hand and finger gestures to tap, swipe, and pinch on profiles, photos, and personal information (Hardley, Mobile 44; Richardson and Wilken 109). In this way, haptic mobile media have changed the way we understand and experience the relationship between intimacy, proximity and touch. (Hjorth and Richardson 33) Smartphones are seamlessly gripped, held, cradled, and touched by the hand. The buttons of early-generation mobile phones that would "stick out" (Plotnick 1647) have been replaced with an interface of slickness, swipes, touches, and taps, resulting in a seamless integration of the device into the human hand. We are well and truly in the "touchscreen moment" (Hjorth, Burgess, and Richardson 1), and a "haptic moment" (Parisi, Paterson, and Archer 1514), where the boundaries between device and body have become diluted. Yet, we are also in the infancy of gimmicky artefacts that act to distance the human hand from the device. Additionally, within the Australian context, we are facing regulatory change considered by Professor Sefton-Green as "an extraordinary test case" (Deakin University par. 6). Until recently, the tethering between human hand and device became so complete that the device was rarely in a different location to the body. The following three examples—from my ethnographic and haptic research, offline gatherings, and gimmicky landline accessories—highlight a reworking of the snug tether characterising much mobile phone use until relatively recently. They consider what happens when the smartphone tethering is re-worked, deliberately or otherwise. Haptic Experiments and Composite Vignettes Over the last decade, I have engaged in longitudinal qualitative studies of Australian smartphone users, with over 100 participants. These studies involved home-visit interviews, online interviews, haptic experiments, app walk-throughs, and GPS tracking, exploring how mobile media are incorporated into everyday embodied experiences. One distinct thread of my research has considered what it feels like to hold a smartphone in the hand—not to use it, per se, but to hold it. Haptic experiments during home-visits have allowed in situ insights into lived experiences of embodied knowledge, proximity, intimacy, and technologies of touch. In one experiment I asked each participant to hold their smartphone in their hand, after which I asked them to describe what their device means to them and how it makes them feel. Participants' responses ranged from holding their phone face-up or face-down in the palm of their hand, rotating their wrist so their phone could be viewed from every angle, stroking the screen of their device affectionately, and closing their eyes and clutching their phone to their chest. Verbal responses included "I'd be lost without it", "it's my world", "it's my connection to everything", through to enthusiastic exclamations of "I love my phone!" and "it's such an unnecessary burden". What these responses revealed was not brand loyalty or an unquestioned digital dependence, but something primordial. How we handle the mobile interface is personal and intimate (Hardley and Richardson, Embodied 101). Smartphones have become so mundane in everyday life that many users hold or cradle their device without giving it much thought. In what follows, I present one composite vignette, a method inspired by Markham (344), Berry (18), and Pink (185), to offer an atmospheric interpretation and description that serves to illuminate one key emergent theme from my research (Hardley, Mobile 99). Reaching for a Device That Isn’t There This vignette of 'Ravi' represents someone in their early twenties living in a share house in a large Australian city, who enjoys socialising with his friends, making a decent wage, and possessing some university education. Ravi illustrates the hand-device intimacy through the felt experience of being without a smartphone. Ravi is halfway to work on a Saturday morning when he realises his smartphone is at home. He pauses on the footpath, sensing an absence before realising the left pocket of his jeans isn't holding the weight and shape of his phone. He decides not to turn back, because he wants to prove to himself that he isn't dependent on his phone. The day feels longer than usual for Ravi. Throughout the day his hand moves to his pocket without thinking. Reaching for the scroll, the swipe, the loop of social media feeds—but he finds he has nothing to reach for. The gesture of reaching to his pocket continues anyway, muscle memory taking precedence over material reality. He experiences the absence as a kind of irritation, like an itch he cannot quite scratch. Ravi does not know what his friends are sending to each other in the group chat, whether the person he's recently started dating has messaged him back, or whether anyone has noticed he has gone quiet. He is not only without the device in his hand; he is, for the day, unreachable within his network. As for many, Ravi's smartphone is held and handled in personal, intimate, and habitual ways which inform his being-in-the-world. Smartphones are designed to "fit nicely" (Wellner 27) to the human body, with an increasingly wide range of sizes and weights that makes the devices easier to be used without physical strain. The “fit” between hand and device described by Cooley (143), and experienced by those represented by Ravi, is so deeply embedded into everyday life that the thumb finds the screen's lower edge without looking, and the fingers curl around the case with a grip that is neither tight nor loose but simply right. This "mutual contouring" (Cooley 145) extends beyond the physical shape of hand and device into the relational, whereby Ravi's smartphone is not merely an object to be held, but also a primary way of remaining connected with people in his life from a distance. Ravi's itch is one of accidental un-tethering—his hand still reaching for what it has learnt to expect, and a network still assumed to be holding him even as he has fallen out of its view. The sections that follow contrast this habituated mode of being-in-the-world with the rise of phone jails, smartphone bans in schools, and disconnect to reconnect strategies (Vanluydt et al. 551). “Reading Rave” Where Ravi's vignette captures an accidental un-tethering where his device was absent, but he kept reaching for it throughout the day, the emergent “1-Hour Reading Rave” events staged by Amsterdam's "Offline Club" propose a different kind of device disruption (fig. 1). Fig. 1: Image from The Offline Club Website. For these events, the device can remain on or near the body but is rendered deliberately unused and out of sight. Participants are asked to arrive with their phones "off and tucked away for the entire hangout" (The Offline Club). The smartphone is not left at home, as with Ravi, but carried into the space and then out of sight (fig. 2). While still present in a bag or pocket, its haptic and networked capacities are suspended rather than removed. Fig. 2: Image from The Offline Club Website. This distinction is useful for reconsidering the concept of the snug tether. My longitudinal research with Australian smartphone users repeatedly surfaced a habitual “mindless” handheld interaction. Many participants described scrolling through Facebook on the train to “avoid looking like a creep who is just doing nothing", glancing at their screens in a shared workplace kitchen to sidestep small talk with colleagues, or playing mobile games such as Candy Crush to procrastinate on a task at home or work (Hardley, Mobile 96). These behaviours suggest the tether is not only, or even primarily, about connectivity (e.g. receiving messages, checking notifications) but about a device-mediated buffer against unwanted social proximity. Like earlier mobile media such as the Sony Walkman (Bull, Sounding 44; Bull, Sound 2), the smartphone offers many users a legitimate, gestural reason not to make eye contact, not to speak, and not to be idle in front of others. Another participant referred to her smartphone and over-ear wireless headphones as “the sign of my generation that I don’t want to be disturbed” (Hardley, Mobile 41). What the reading rave stages, then, is not the absence of the tether but its suspension. In doing so, the physical intimacy persists in the pocket even as the relational intimacy of use is temporarily immobilised. Paradoxically, these events require online registration, booking via a Web browser and app. What can be observed is a blending of pre-mobile practices where “landmarks and times were the points that coordinated action and convergence in urban space” (Ito and Obake 266), and a temporarily modified snug tether of attendees. Distancing Accessories to Render Smartphones Less Mobile One of my participants spoke about locking her smartphone in a drawer at work because she had become so absorbed in progressing levels in Candy Crush, which she described as “obsessive”. She expressed concern about getting into trouble for gaming during work hours and recalled needing a physical and visual separation from her smartphone to focus on her work tasks. This participant shared her story with me before the rise of gimmicky artefacts such as the "Handheld Retro Wired Telephone Handset with Microphone for Smartphones" (fig. 3). With old-school landlines making a cultural comeback (Stevens), the snug and seamless tether coined by Ito and practiced by most smartphone users is being interrupted, with an apparent desire to remain close to, but distanced from, smartphones. Fig. 3: A retro-style wired handset with a Type-C connector, designed to attach to a smartphone for a nostalgic, corded-phone calling experience. Simultaneously, and somewhat paradoxically, many smartphone users are currently expending considerable effort trying to disrupt the snug tether. Self-imposed strategies, such as greyscale settings, app timers, do not disturb schedules, and phones left deliberately in another room are emerging alongside more formalised, institutional interventions such as banning smartphones in schools. "Phone jails" (fig. 4), lockable pouches distributed at concerts (Sisson and Whalen 514), and smartphone bans at schools (Anderson 3; Robards et al. 493) increasingly work to de-couple the body-device seamless integration. Fig. 4: The "Mobile Phone Jail Cell Lock-Up Locking Box", a novelty timer-based device marketed for restricting phone access, holding up to six devices. Where Ravi's de-tethering was accidental, and the reading rave's is collective and scheduled, the distancing artefacts in this section offer a more deliberate variation to the snug tether. The participant who locks her smartphone in a drawer is deliberately attempting to disrupt a device-hand habit that she deemed risky in the workplace. It signals a physical break in the loop of touch and response that the smartphone was designed to perform. Alongside these accessories, companies such as Coilie are capitalising on this cultural moment of making mobile media less mobile. Coilie (fig. 5) is a wall-mounted dock with a coiled cord that holds the phone itself, rather than a handset attachment, marketed on social media with posts claiming as "we simply gave the phone an intentional home" (Coilie). Fig. 5: Screenshot of Coilie Instagram reel. Coilie boldly leans into the pseudo-neuroscientific marketing language of "rewire your brain” and “give your phone a home, your mind a rest, and your nervous system a reset”. The retro handset accessory attempts to remove the proximity of human hand and ear to the device. It resembles a corded and clunky object that has been described as a “cord-twirling comeback” (Stevens) relationship to telecommunication. In cradling this accessory, the user does not relinquish the experience of holding a device to the ear or in the hand, but there is a redirecting of attention away from the smartphone and towards the retro headset. Phone jails and lockable pouches formalise this same impulse at an institutional scale, substituting self-discipline with hard containment. The device is neither at home, as with Ravi, nor merely switched off in a pocket, as at the reading rave, but rendered physically inaccessible to the hand that would otherwise reach for it. While the previous two examples disrupt the snug tether, these artefacts and interventions actively seek to sever it, if only temporarily. Conclusion This article began with Ito's observation that the mobile phone offers "a snug and intimate technosocial tethering" (Ito 1), alongside the fit of the smartphone in hand. As the discussion of touchscreen design highlighted, the device is engineered for a closeness to the human body and hand (Richardson and Wilken 121). It is seamlessly gripped, cradled, and touched, its slickness replacing the buttons that stick out of earlier mobile phone design. The three examples that followed each unsettle this mutual contouring. Ravi's accidental un-tethering revealed how deeply the snug tether is embodied, with his hand continuing to reach for a device that was not there. The reading rave staged a collective and scheduled version of a disruption, suspending rather than removing the tether. The distancing accessories, from the retro handset to Coilie's wall-mounted dock, attempt to interrupt the constant handling of the smartphone in domestic spaces. School smartphone bans, now legislated in various Australian states and elsewhere, extend this same logic from the individual body to an entire regulated population, and from the domestic to the institutional: rather than a device an individual chooses to set aside, it is a separation insisted upon for the entirety of the school day. It is likely no coincidence that stationary landline accessories such as the phone jail are being marketed in the same cultural moment (Stevens); the impulse Coilie sells to individual consumers is, in schools, formalised as policy. We are, then, still well and truly in the touchscreen moment and the haptic moment, where the boundaries between device and body remain diluted for most everyday use. But alongside it, this article has traced the infancy of a different cultural moment altogether—from scroll-free community events to neuroscientifically-worded marketing of landline accessories, the snug tether is being called into question. While Ravi's account was drawn from ethnographic and phenomenological research into smartphone use in Australia from 2016 to 2025, the phone jails and de-tethering tools this article discusses are emergent phenomena. As a society, we are at the precipice of new policies and practices, requiring further attention to how the smartphone is experienced, and how its presence and absence is both realised and resisted once policy and design intervene. Ravi's muscle memory, reaching for an empty pocket, is a useful motif to end on, as it is a collective experience for many smartphone users. Whether that itch is felt the same way by every-body is a question this article has not tried to answer, nor can it. My larger body of research suggests it will not be, because if the smartphone has been incorporated differently (Hardley, Mobile 24; Hardley and Richardson, Embodied 91), its de-tethering is unlikely to be felt as either neutral or universal. As with any tool, how and why we use, and are without, smartphones are shaped by age, gender, race, and disability (Salen Tekinbaş 35), a line of intersectional analysis I have pursued at greater length elsewhere (Hardley, Gender 65), and one that further work on de-tethering will need to sustain. Future work might extend this inquiry to moments where the snug tether becomes a matter of physical safety rather than habit, such as Cumiskey and Hjorth's (418) research on mobile phone use during the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando Florida (USA) in 2016, and my own ongoing research into women’s and girls’ smartphone safety practices in public spaces in Australia. This raises further questions about what is gained and lost when policy asks users to unlearn and distance from the social and physical and digital layers that characterise smartphone design and use. References Anderson, Morgan. "Student Perspectives on Smartphone Bans in Schools: A Postdigital Critical Analysis." Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies (2026). . Berry, Marsha. Creating with Mobile Media. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. New York: Berg, 2000. ———. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. New York: Routledge, 2007. Coilie. 1 July 2026 . Cooley, Heidi Rae. "It's All about the Fit: The Hand, the Mobile Screenic Device and Tactile Vision." Journal of Visual Culture 3.2 (2004): 133–55. Cumiskey, Kathleen M., and Larissa Hjorth. "'I Wish They Could Have Answered Their Phones': Mobile Communication in Mass Shootings." Death Studies 43.7 (2019): 414–25. Deakin University. "Deakin Education Expert Helps Assess Australia's Teen Social Media Crackdown." Deakin University, 15 Oct. 2025. 15 July 2026 . Dick Smith Australia. “Built-In Timer Mobile Phone Jail Cell Lock-Up Locking Box." 1 July 2026 . ———. "Microway 1m Retro Wired Handheld Telephone Handset with Microphone, Type-C Plug for Smartphones, PC —Red." 1 July 2026 . Frith, Jordan. Smartphones as Locative Media. Polity, 2015. Gordon, Eric, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Hardley, Jess. "Gender and Smart Cities." Handbook on Gender and Cities. Eds. L. Peake, A. Datta, and G. Adeniyi-Ogunyankin. Edward Elgar, 2024. 65–74. ———. Mobile Media and the Urban Environment: Embodied Perceptions of Space, Place and Safety. PhD Dissertation. RMIT University, 2022. Hardley, Jess, and Ingrid Richardson. "Digital Placemaking and Networked Corporeality: Embodied Mobile Media Practices in Domestic Space during Covid-19." Convergence 27.3 (2021): 625–36. Hardley, Jess, and Ingrid Richardson. "Embodied Excess: Describing and Interpreting Haptic Mobile Media Practices." Data Excess in Digital Media Research. Eds. Natalie A. Hendry and Ingrid Richardson. Emerald, 2024. 87–104. Hardley, Jess, and Ingrid Richardson. "Mistrust of the City at Night: Networked Connectivity and Embodied Perceptions of Risk and Safety." Australian Feminist Studies 36.107 (2021): 65–81. Hjorth, Larissa, and Ingrid Richardson. Ambient Play. MIT P, 2020. Hjorth, Larissa, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson, eds. Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone. Routledge, 2012. Ito, Mizuko. "Introduction: Personal, Portable, Pedestrian." Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Eds. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. MIT P, 2006. 1–16. Ito, Mizuko, and Daisuke Okabe. "Technosocial Situations: Emergent Structuring of Mobile E-Mail Use." Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Eds. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. MIT P, 2005. 257–73. Markham, Annette. "Fabrication as Ethical Practice: Qualitative Inquiry in Ambiguous Internet Contexts." Information, Communication and Society 15.3 (2012): 334–53. Mitchell, Peta, Marcus Foth, and Irina Anastasiu. "Geographies of Locative Apps." Routledge Handbook of Media Geographies. Eds. Paul C. Adams and Barney Warf. Routledge, 2022. 183–95. Offline Club, The. 1 July 2026 . Parisi, David, Mark Paterson, and Jason Edward Archer. "Haptic Media Studies." New Media and Society 19.10 (2017): 1513–22. Paterson, Mark. The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Berg, 2007. Pink, Sarah. Doing Visual Ethnography. 4th ed. 2020. Plotnick, Rachel. "Force, Flatness and Touch without Feeling: Thinking Historically about Haptics and Buttons." New Media and Society 19.10 (2017): 1632–52. Richardson, Ingrid. "Touching the Screen: A Phenomenology of Mobile Gaming and the iPhone." Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone. Eds. Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson. Routledge, 2012. 133–54. Richardson, Ingrid, and Rowan Wilken. Bodies and Mobile Media. 2024. Robards, Brady, James Goring, and Natalie Ann Hendry. "Guiding Young People's Social Media Use in School Policies: Opportunities, Risks, Moral Panics, and Imagined Futures." Journal of Youth Studies 29.4 (2026): 492–508. Salen Tekinbaş, Katie. "Afraid to Roam: The Unlevel Playing Field of Pokémon Go." Mobile Media and Communication 5.1 (2017): 34–7. Sisson, Annamarie, and Elizabeth Whalen. "Getting Back to Human Touch: Habit and Change Decisions during Mobile Device Intermediations at Events." Consumer Behavior in Tourism and Hospitality 17.4 (2022): 514-29. . Stevens, Rhiannon. "The Old-School Landline Is Having a Cultural Moment." ABC News, 16 Nov. 2025. 26 July 2026 . Vanluydt, Elien, et al. "Disconnect To Reconnect: How Variations between Types of Smartphone Bans Influence Students' Well-Being and Social Connectedness in Dutch Secondary Education." Journal of Youth and Adolescence 55 (2026): 551–69. Wellner, Galit P. A Postphenomenological Inquiry of Cell Phones: Genealogies, Meanings and Becoming. Lexington Books, 2016.

‘Embodiment’ is inherent to experiences of and with art practice, as well as to our experiences of digital media and culture as they manifest in the material world that we all inhabit. Building on the 2025 M/C Journal issue, ‘experience’ (Jung et al.), which similarly explored the relationship between digital and material experience, this issue questions how the presence or absence of digital spaces influences embodied practices across fields, including, but not limited to, visual arts, design, media and cultural studies, education, health, critical disability studies, and social geography. Unavoidably, a timely discussion of Generative AI is woven through several of the articles in this issue. A late-stage capitalist, technocratic, contemporary world is increasingly marked by a palpable blur between the digital and the material. Although both co-exist in contemporary media and culture—and criticism of framing the digital and physical as a binary is nothing new (Hayles)—it is hard to forget that digital spaces emerged from the material. Yet contemporary discourse often assumes the trajectory is already set: the only way forward is digital and everything else is somehow regressive. In the context of visual arts, for example, the ‘death of painting’ has been proclaimed multiple times, notably after the advent of analogue photography. More recently, historians have argued that this was less 'a nail in the coffin' and more an intervention that prompted innovations among modernist and postmodernist artists, demonstrating visual arts' uncanny persistence (Storr). Similarly, the death of analogue photography was declared after the advent of digital photography, a technology that now faces its own crisis in the face of generative AI imagery. Yet all continue to co-exist. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse failed to gain widespread adoption despite tens of billions of dollars in investment and promotion, while the manual arts continue to thrive despite ongoing cuts to the arts by institutions and government. Notwithstanding this, both the digital and material endure together, even, at times, complementing each other. Zoom meetings and online workshops are also yet to ‘kill’ in-person interaction. Neither one seems likely to supersede the other; they co-exist. ‘Embodiment’ can, quite comfortably, have varying degrees of both: it can be a metaphorical ‘slider’ with Physical on the left and Digital on the right. Woven throughout this issue are references to the physical, emphasising that this seemingly inevitable march towards an increasingly digital world is simply not uni-directional. These articles challenge assumptions that this metaphorical slider will eventually be stuck on Digital, while noting the opportunities and pitfalls of both sides. Enduring traditions of digital and material practices remain relevant, even if they must renegotiate their roles in contemporary media and culture. The articles in this issue approach embodiment through a range of practices, disciplines, and lived experiences. The feature article, 'The Mantic Stain of Experience: Surrealist Automatism and the Irreproducible', by Kelsey Ashe, examines how surrealist automatism, embodied field practice, and ecological attunement can generate irreproducible forms of artistic knowledge. Drawing on practice-led research undertaken during an artist residency in Western Australia's Karri forest, the article argues for recognising intuitive, mantic, and esoteric ways of knowing as legitimate contributions to contemporary artistic and academic discourse. 'Touching Clay, Sensing Climate: Situating Design Practice and Pedagogy with Noongar Country', by Alison Blackwell, critiques current design pedagogy that simulates the world, rather than engaging with it. These approaches are contrasted with material experiences, designing-with Clay and Noongar Country, that embody environmental literacy and help address ecological challenges. In 'Teaching, Improvising, Galumphing?', Daniel Hirsch reflects on the experience of his teaching, a practice he frames as creative, improvisational, and joyful. It foregrounds the often-overlooked experience of the teacher, challenging educational systems that prioritise student data and outcomes. Through critical self-reflection on practice and Stephen Nachmanovitch's concept of galumphing, teaching is explored as play. The article argues that teachers’ individuality and originality are central to education, and teachers are valuable members of their classroom. Dennis Olsen's 'Curating Age: Automation, Embodiment, and the Design of Experience in UK Television Advertising' investigates how ageing is organised as an affective experience within contemporary advertising cultures. Through an analysis of three UK television campaigns, the article argues that automated and pre-structured design logics privilege emotionally recognisable forms of later life, shaping how ageing is made feelable, intelligible and publicly understood. Jess Hardley's 'Revisiting the “Snug Tether” in the Era of Scroll-Free Social Events, Landline Accessories, and Smartphone Bans' highlights the social, physical, and digital dimensions of everyday smartphone use via a series of case studies. Their examples interrogate what is to be learned by disrupting the taken-for-grantedness of the 'snug tether' linking the smartphone to the body that habitually uses it. In 'Designing Embodied Engagement Strategies to Support Health Goals in Fitness Apps', Zhou Jing and Jo Jung examine how gamification can better support sustained engagement with fitness apps in China. Noting that few users engage for more than 30 days, they argue that fitness apps need to consider users’ changing abilities, interests, and experiences, rather than focussing mainly on motivation. In ‘Expert Eyes, Machine Hands: Creativity, Aesthetics, and Accountability in GenAI’, Angelique Nairn, Justin Matthews, Angela Asuncion, Daniel Fastnedge, Matthew Guinibert, and AD Narayan examine how creative professionals use GenAI to develop an advertising campaign. Through collaborative autoethnography, they identify acceleration, aesthetic convergence, and expert refinement as key mechanisms of human–AI co-creativity, demonstrating how professional judgment remains essential to maintaining originality, quality, and accountability in algorithmically generated work. Kathryn Locke, Alison Myers, Katie Ellis, and Tama Leaver interrogate Facebook and Reddit posts to investigate the politics of, and users' responses to, Audio Description—a service originally intended for blind and low-vision consumers. They posit, in 'The Embodied Politics of Audio Description: Social Media and Experiential Paradigms', that social media responses to the service show how Audio Description transcends functional accommodation to encompass an intersectionality with place, identity, and community belonging. In 'The Body Reads First: Neuroaffective Reading as Embodied Critical Method', Tess Ezzy treats the exclusion of embodied engagement from critical reading practice as an epistemic loss. Disciplinary training, she argues, calibrates readers away from corporeal response. Against this she offers neuroaffective reading as a method: a critical practice that takes as its object the “somatic, affective and attentional traffic between a work and its reading body”. Harrison Waed See examines 'translation' as a source of creativity in ‘Studio Experiences of Translation: Embracing the “Uneven Fit” of Alternative Modalities to Prompt Novel Approaches to Painting’. See explores how videogame tropes can be integrated into embodied approaches to painting. Rather than treating inherent differences between material and digital media as a problem to be solved, he argues that experimental attempts to bridge this “uneven fit” can lead to novel approaches to visual storytelling. In ‘Designing for Adventure: Learning and Creativity Informed by Holographic Media’, Martina Mrongovius draws on her work as an artist, curator, and producer to consider how holographic art shapes perception, learning, and creativity. Through installations, participatory artworks, maps, and sound trails, she examines how ambiguity, movement, and guidance affect engagement with unfamiliar media. Mrongovius proposes adventure as a framework for experiences that encourage agency, curiosity, and exploration without predetermining every outcome. Patricia Amorim da Silva brings feminist art practice into dialogue with theories of the performative, performativity, and the preperformative in ‘From Embodiment to Identity’. Drawing on her own work and that of Brazilian artists and collectives, she presents identity as shaped through language, repetition, memory, cultural symbols, and bodily experience. Placing embodiment at the centre, Amorim da Silva shows how feminist art can challenge established representations of gender and open more fluid and inclusive understandings of identity. This issue is also marked by an absence that we believe should be made visible. An approved, double-blind peer-reviewed article, ‘Gaming the Body: Embodied Capital and Gendered Exclusion in Iran’s Gamenets’ by Mohammed Mahdi Ashtari, a researcher based in Iran, was prevented from proceeding to publication as a result of Australian Government Sanctions against Iran, Russia, and North Korea. As with other Universities, Edith Cowan University has advised the editors that these Sanctions mean there can be no collaboration with researchers in Iran, including editing and publishing, even though no security concerns are raised by the article. We deeply regret that these restrictions have prevented the article’s publication. We are working to bring attention to the Australian government’s suppression of academic freedom. This has been an exciting journey. Beginning with a call for articles on 'experience', we received enough submissions for two issues, with many of the articles riffing the theme of 'embodiment'. This issue is that theme, made public. We are grateful to General Editor Axel Bruns for his support, to our authors for accepting the delay and believing in the ‘embodiment’ issue, and to our reviewers for their hard work and constructive feedback. M/C Journal was open access before open access was a thing. It has embodied the free exchange of ideas and knowledge for almost 27 years, enriching the lives and perspectives of those who read it, and write it. We celebrate being part of this community: thank you all! References Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1999. Jung, Jo, Harrison W. See, and Lelia Green. “Experience.” M/C Journal 28.5 (2025). . Storr, Robert. Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting. Laurence King Publishing, 2020.

It started with a bland tweet by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, simply saying, "just setting up my twttr” in March 2006. Twenty years on, the anniversary of Twitter’s launch presents an opportunity to diagnose a platform that has garnered so much scholarly, media, and public attention over the past two decades. Twitter's legacy is best understood as a history of public communication infrastructure and its failures, rather than just as a platform history. This issue treats Twitter as an analytically significant object, even as the platform itself has been rebranded as X and undergone a radical transformation. The name matters because “Twitter” captures more than a single platform under a single owner. It describes a cultural imprint, a set of communication practices, and a body of scholarly work that shaped how we understand social media itself. The tension between commemoration and critique runs through this issue. We are not simply marking a milestone. We seek to examine what remains when a platform mutates beyond recognition. What happens when the object of study changes ownership, governance, and infrastructure while retaining some contested form of continuity? This question of periodisation runs through the various contributions. Early scholarly work mapped user behaviour and technical affordances from computer science perspectives. The field expanded rapidly between 2009 and 2014 as Twitter became entangled with world events, generating influential frameworks like ambient journalism and hashtag publics. This also highlighted user agency as something to be recognised and reckoned with, rather than just tracked and mapped. Research from media, communication, and cultural studies perspectives showed that Twitter’s users were actively involved in co-creating the platform. Later scholarship turned more critical, examining datafication, algorithmic power, and the political economy of the platform. Foundational work on Black Twitter in the US, Blak Twitter in Australia, and gendered harassment revealed structural platform dynamics. Most recently, with the Musk acquisition in October 2022, researchers have documented processes of platform decline and what Doctorow described as “enshittification”. As issue editors, we are not disinterested observers of Twitter’s twenty-year trajectory. Twitter has shaped our careers, and we have shaped how others study it. We have both used the platform throughout most of its existence, building professional networks and conducting research through it. We are aware that we might overstate Twitter's importance because our work depends on it, or let nostalgia for earlier versions of the platform cloud our judgment. We have tried to address these risks by including diverse voices in this issue, bringing together scholars working across the disciplines of journalism studies, political communication, platform studies, data science, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). We present this issue as an honest assessment of a platform's legacy while that platform still exists, albeit in a mutated form that is a shadow of its former self. Contributions We open the issue with a feature article by Axel Bruns, exploring the role of Twitter as a key platform for public debate. Bruns traces the history of the platform from its initial Oprah-endorsed breakthrough to its decline under Elon Musk. He points to the scramble by users and developers to find alternatives to X, which, with varying degrees of success, reimagine some of the affordances that attracted people to Twitter in the first place. But is the solution really to create another Twitter clone, in an increasingly crowded field of contenders? What lessons can we learn both from Twitter’s initial successes and X’s ultimate failure? We continue with a section of articles that addresses Twitter’s key role as a channel for breaking news, journalism, and information. First, Alfred Hermida revisits his concept of “ambient journalism”, which described how, in its heyday, Twitter enabled ordinary users as well as professional journalists to monitor the platform as a global ambient information feed. Present-day X no longer functions in this way. Its information feed is polluted by mis- and disinformation, channelled by algorithmic interventions, and increasingly drowned out by AI-generated content. This produces a new kind of synthetic ambience, Hermida suggests. Next, Elizabeth Dubois examines the rise and fall of Twitter as a tool especially for political journalism. While many journalists remain on X, platform changes have severely reduced its utility to the profession. Journalists and other political commentators are increasingly exploring other tools and platforms for communicating their insights and analysis. This fragmentation of political coverage and public debate, and the rise of newsfluencers and other nontraditional actors, raise significant concerns for democratic communication. Twitter was a key platform for breaking news of another kind, too, for official as well as crowdsourced updates during natural disasters and other acute events. In her article, Leysia Palen reflects on the trajectory of disaster responders on the platform. Her article traces how crisis communication on Twitter has evolved over time. She examines early experiments with platforms like Twitter, their adoption into mainstream disaster response practices, and their eventual decline as algorithms and disinformation undermined their effectiveness. This is concerning as nothing has filled the gap in the crisis communication infrastructure created by the decline of Twitter. Our second section of articles further broadens our perspective on Twitter as a source of news and information. It opens with an article by Timothy Graham that positions Twitter as “epistemic infrastructure”. He argues the platform explicitly encouraged its users to adopt a reportorial stance in informing others about the world around them. But reporting requires verification. In its reluctance, under a ‘free speech’ doctrine, to police even explicitly false information, Twitter left itself wide open to disinformation and influence operations. The consequences of these choices point to the architectural challenges that new platforms seeking to replace Twitter must now face. Despite their statements to the contrary, Twitter, as it was, and X as it now is, were never neutral actors in any of this, of course. Our next article, by Marisa Duarte and Marco Bastos, shows this with particular attention to X under Elon Musk. The platform is now firmly interwoven with open source intelligence and state surveillance tools as provided by Palantir, Babel Street, and other deeply problematic actors whose owners share Musk’s anti-democratic and techno-utopian mindset. X has become both a source of data for this “shallow state”, which can be used in policing and integrated with state-held data, and a tool for narrative control and propaganda. As current developments in the United States show, this presents a clear danger to democratic governance. These dystopian developments stand in clear contrast to the initiatives towards sovereign European social media platforms, which Christoph Neuberger outlines in his contribution to this issue. Musk’s takeover of Twitter has added further urgency to such developments. His actions have highlighted the precarity of a European public sphere which is dependent on Silicon Valley platforms. In the absence of a truly European public sphere at present, its development and the development of platforms that would support it must go hand in hand. Neuberger’s article discusses what initiatives towards these goals already exist, and sketches out a path towards a European media platform that is oriented towards the common good. The articles in our next section shift our perspective towards the needs of researchers themselves. Through much of its history, Twitter was a major source of data on public communication, not just about news, politics, and current events, but also about social and cultural events and activities and much more. Access to research data about the many uses of the platform was hard-won and remained precarious, as Fabio Giglietto and Cornelius Puschmann discuss in their article. Access shaped researcher practices that were not always well-suited to their objects of research. With data access now effectively blocked and users moving to various other platforms anyway, new frameworks must be considered. These include formal requirements for public-interest research data access, such as those implemented under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (Article 40), as well as alternative modes of gathering data about platform activities that involve rather than merely observe users, such as data donations. In the second article in this section, Katrin Weller, Yining Wang, Yannik Peters, and Johannes B. Gruber explore the longstanding and unresolved challenges of preserving the history of Twitter and of preserving Twitter as a source of historical data. From early Twitter data gathering by researchers to the Library of Congress’s unsuccessful attempt to archive all of Twitter, the platform has long been seen as a window on history as it happened. Capturing that history has faced various practical, ethical, privacy, and legal hurdles. Moreover, the true experience of being on Twitter at a particular point in time is now difficult to reconstruct. We must now work to preserve the scattered archives that do exist and learn our lessons for the preservation of current and future social media platforms. Our final articles return to the overall questions that the legacy of Twitter raises for the future of social media. Breigha Adeyemo and Zizi Papacharissi introduce the concept of unbecoming. The Twitter that was has now unbecome, following its acquisition by Elon Musk and conversion into X. But X itself is unbecoming of a major public communications infrastructure in a democratic society. This state of affairs is emblematic for more than just this one platform, though, and cannot be fixed by incremental technological change or regulatory intervention. Unbecoming, therefore, also means undoing and rethinking from the ground up the prevailing logics of social media, given their focus on permanent growth and value extraction. We conclude the issue, quite appropriately, with an obituary. Tanja Bosch reflects especially on the role that Twitter played in enabling and supporting the formation of prosocial and activist digital publics and on the gap that Twitter’s demise leaves in public communication around the world. But this is no mere memento mori. Rather, she highlights this dependence on commercially operated social media platforms, noting that their operational logics are not inherently prosocial or even pro-democratic. This serves as an important reminder that fragility is a constitutive condition of contemporary digital publics and raises the critical question of how publicness can be sustained in a changing, fragmented communicative environment. Conclusion Several tensions run through this issue, then, starting with the pull between nostalgia and critique. Resisting the temptation to romanticise old Twitter requires acknowledging what was genuinely lost without pretending the platform was ever perfect. Twitter was always a bit like Schrödinger's cat of communication, containing both possibility and harm, connection and toxicity, democratic potential and algorithmic manipulation. The transformation under Musk has made some of these dynamics far more visible, but it is important to acknowledge that they were present from the beginning. The question of what to call the platform carries political and analytical weight. Continuing to say “Twitter” rather than “X” matters. “Twitter” encapsulates a set of communication practices, a vernacular, a mindset, and a scholarly object that cannot be erased by new ownership. The archive remains, at least in part, the research corpus persists, and the cultural imprint endures even as the platform morphs into a very different beast. For most people, this scholarly and political significance was always background noise. Twitter existed primarily as a space for everyday life. People performed identity, united in grief, found community, shared jokes, or posted about lunch. Mundane sociality circulated alongside breaking news of natural disasters. These practices shaped what Twitter meant to millions of people who never engaged with its politics or its publicness. Scale and intimacy have always rubbed shoulders in productive tension throughout Twitter's history. The platform has functioned simultaneously as a mass broadcast medium and as a space for affective, subcultural, and community-specific communication. A single tweet could reach millions or a mere dozen. Direct messages and protected accounts offered spaces for more intimate connections. Twitter, as one of a range of social media platforms, also highlights the precarity of platform-dependent research. Research programs become vulnerable when a company can shut down API access, delete archives, or fundamentally alter terms of service. The trajectory from Twitter to X underscores the need for scholars to develop sustainable ways to study digital communication that are not dependent on corporate cooperation or goodwill. This issue comes at a particular time in the history of platforms. The European Union is enforcing its Digital Services Act, while the US policy approach continues to shift. Generative AI is being used on the Internet and social platforms to create or rework content, moderate content, and manage user experiences. People are moving to newer platforms, reviving older ones, or abandoning social media altogether. These developments form the context in which we understand Twitter's arc. Any single collection has limits. This issue cannot address every dimension of Twitter's legacy. It centres primarily on Anglophone scholarship and certain disciplinary traditions. We are cognisant that platform legacies are plural, contested, and ongoing, acknowledging the continued need for longitudinal research, comparative platform studies, and work from non-Western contexts. Understanding Twitter's twenty-year trajectory matters beyond media archaeology. The platform shaped democratic communication, data practices, and assumptions about public life online. Debates about data justice, digital infrastructures for the public good, and the conditions for meaningful civic discourse all connect to what Twitter was, what it became, and what might replace it. The contributions in this issue are not intended as a eulogy. They offer a critical accounting of what networked public life became and unbecame on one particular platform. They trace how corporate decisions, user practices, regulatory frameworks, and technical affordances interact to influence what is possible and likely. They ask what remains when a platform undergoes a far-reaching transfiguration and what gets lost when corporate interests ride roughshod over the public good. We end with a call to imagine, or perhaps reimagine, what networked public life might yet be. The past twenty years revealed both the fragility and the resilience of digital publics. The next phase depends on lessons learned, infrastructures built, and choices made about who controls the spaces where public communication happens. Acknowledgments As editors, we are thoroughly grateful to the authors, many of whom were Twitter users and researchers since the early days of the platform, who agreed to embark on this project with us. We would also like to thank the many peer reviewers who contributed substantially to bringing out the best of these articles.

Introduction The currently dominant digital platforms are associated with many negative effects on democratic societies, such as disinformation, hate speech, and propaganda. In the case of X, the platform has become a personal megaphone for its owner Elon Musk. The “Great Sysop” has gained considerable power over public opinion formation and is promoting “platform illiberalism” (Magalhães et al.). However, Twitter has also added valuable features that have enhanced public communication, particulary in journalism, which is the focus of the present article. Journalists used Twitter for purposes such as live reporting, news aggregation, including citizens as sources, organising debates (Artwick), and fact checking (Coddington et al.). Hermida coined the term “ambient journalism” to describe journalism’s role on Twitter as a novel “awareness system”. In 2014, a newsroom survey in Germany compared the use of different platforms in journalism (Neuberger et al.). Twitter was most often used for brief breaking news and real-time reporting. Editorial staff also utilised Twitter and Facebook relatively often for investigation and monitoring. Twitter was used especially to contact elite sources, such as experts and prominent people, and for monitoring their public appearances. Twitter and Facebook were the preferred platforms for user participation in journalism. Twitter served as a testing ground for new forms of journalism. But this is all history. These achievements have been lost since Elon Musk took over the platform. This raises the questions: how should a common good-oriented platform be designed and governed? What lessons can be learned from the journalistic adaptation of Twitter? I will address these questions by focussing on the transnational European public sphere. European Public Sphere as Goal The philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Für Europa), who passed away in March 2026, continued to advocate for European autonomy, integration, and democratisation, particularly in the context of today's polycrisis. He believed that establishing a common European public sphere by transnationalising the many national public spheres is essential (Habermas, Demokratie 188–91). But the European public sphere still has significant shortcomings (e.g., Brüggemann and Kleinen-von Königslöw; Brüggemann et al.). There is a lack of European media, audiences interested in European issues, and European perspectives in national media. Europeanisation is particularly evident in the vertical dimension (“looking towards Brussels”), but less so in the horizontal dimension. Looking beyond national borders at other national discourses is therefore crucial here. Another weakness is the low citizen participation in the European public sphere. The question of a European public sphere has regained importance in recent years. In light of the current geopolitical situation, the European Union (EU) is striving for greater digital sovereignty. This concept emphasises state authority over the Internet, replacing the earlier concept of “multistakeholderism”, which viewed the Internet as a distinct, decentralised, and transnational space beyond the reach of politics (Pohle and Santianello). The call for digital sovereignty encompasses not only the technical and economic dimension, but also the political and cultural dimension. Digital sovereignty “must not be conflated with isolation or protectionism, in the European context, it can be described as the capacity of being independent while remaining open to collaboration and committed to shared values such as transparency, democracy, and the rule of law” (Bria et al. 10). European values are often cited as the goal of digital sovereignty (e.g., Di Marco et al.; Kagermann and Wilhelm; Roberts et al.), but are not precisely defined. The EU is often criticised for over-regulating platforms and AI, hindering innovation and competitiveness. However, there are serious doubts as to whether this criticism is valid (Bradford, False Choice). Nevertheless, the EU must not only regulate, but also provide better platforms. This requires a change in mindset: regulation only defines the minimum normative requirements that must be met in every case. This negative approach must then be complemented by a positive one that describes how platforms can promote the common good. The EU could offer a more appealing alternative to the libertarian approach of the US and the authoritarian approach of China (Bradford, Digital Empires). Public Sphere and Public Value But how can the common good be defined? In the media sector, it is usually referred to as “public value”. This management concept was introduced by Mark H. Moore in his seminal book Creating Public Value. It was intended as a practical framework for public sector management, offering an alternative to the market-oriented, neo-liberal “new public management” and its premise that the public good is simply the sum of individual consumer interests. In contrast to this market-oriented view, the public value concept focusses on contributions to society’s common good beyond individual self-interest (Alford and Hughes 132; Moore, “Reflections” 366–9). The BBC adopted it in its programmatic statement Building Public Value. In this statement, public value was defined through three “public principles” (universality, fairness and equity, accountability) and five “public purposes” (democratic value, cultural and creative value, educational value, social and community value, global value) (7–8). A recent paper, Creating and Measuring Dynamic Public Value at the BBC, distinguishes between individual value, social value, and industrial value (Mazzucato et al. 23–8). The BBC’s public value test for public broadcasting outlets has been adopted by many EU countries (Collins; Donders). Some scholars have criticised a lack of clarity about what public value means substantially (e.g., Benington 42–6; Collins 175). Others have argued that public value cannot be defined “in some absolute sense” (Alford and Hughes 133) because public value must be, at least partially, open to the outcomes of democratic political processes (Alford and O’Flynn 175–8; Benington 233–4). The concept of hybrid common good offers a solution for these contradictory expectations (Blum; Neuberger, Auftrag). According to this approach, the common good comprises a substantive component consisting of liberal-democratic values to be realised in the value creation process, alongside public discourse as procedural component, in which those values are interpreted and concretised. These values are the “guardrails”, setting the boundaries for possible outcomes of the democratic public discourse, and also the standards for the discourse itself. How can the European values be defined more precisely? One obvious option is to derive them from normative theories of democracy. Several proposals have been made as to how normative theories of democracy can be applied to the public sphere and journalism (e.g., Christians et al. 95–105, 125–7; Ferree et al.; Gerhards; Martinsen; McQuail; Strömbäck). While these typologies differ, the theories agree that the media should at least create a common public sphere and a shared body of knowledge on current topics of public interest. Both are necessary prerequisites for the formation of individual and collective opinion. Valid and shared knowledge requires news production to be based on journalistic standards and to allow freedom of information and equal access to knowledge. However, beyond this, the theories make different demands regarding the process of opinion formation. Deliberative theory sets higher normative expectations for discourse progression than liberal and participatory theory (Martinsen). It demands a rational, respectful, and domination-free discourse in which the persuasiveness of the better argument—in the best case—leads to consensus. In summary, nine values of the public sphere can be derived from theories of democracy, whose normative expectations partially overlap: news and discourse quality, freedom, equality, diversity, power symmetry, criticism and control, security, and integration (Neuberger, Öffentlichkeit). Initiatives to Build a European Media Platform A more democratic digital public sphere cannot be achieved simply by regulating existing platform and AI companies. It is equally important to create media platforms and AI applications that are oriented towards the common good as an alternative to the commercial offerings that currently dominate the market. Although Habermas acknowledged the potential of the digital public sphere to contribute to the emancipation of citizens, he viewed the Internet as an “ambivalent explosive force” (Habermas, New Structural 35). He missed a “substitute for the professional selection and discursive examination of contents based on accepted cognitive standards” (38–39) on these platforms. Since 2017, there has been an ongoing discussion about the idea of a European media platform oriented towards the common good that would fulfil European values, create a European public sphere, and strengthen Europe’s digital sovereignty. Ulrich Wilhelm, the director of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation (Bayerischer Rundfunk), was the first and strongest advocate of this idea. He expressed concern that “Europe is in danger of losing digital sovereignty over its defining values” (Wilhelm 15; translated by the author). Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal (146) outlined a “value-centric design of the platform society”, which should realise “public values” such as safety, privacy, transparency, accuracy, democratic control, quality, accessibility, comprehensiveness, equality, inclusiveness, fair treatment, responsibility, and accountability (139–41). Hillje (133–60) proposed four elements for a “Platform Europe”: a European newsroom and a European news service, opportunities for citizens to participate, a cultural connection representing Europe's diversity and common “European Way of Life”, and apps for citizens to take action and interact. Another plan proposed the creation of a European infrastructure for public service media and other media, as well as for science, culture, and citizens (Kagermann and Wilhelm). What has been achieved until now? Not much. Several proposals have been made to create a European media platform. The Council for European Public Space, an NGO, has developed a draft for a decentralised platform for trustworthy news called “Delphi” (Pfeffer). The Public Spaces Incubator (PSI) brings together public service media from different countries to work together to develop platforms for better public dialogue. The PSI toolkit will be made publicly available as open-source software by 2027. The European Cultural Foundation develops and supports cultural initiatives that foster “belonging, solidarity, and democratic values—building connections across Europe and empowering communities to shape a shared future.” It presented the draft for European Digital Public Spaces back in 2020. France and Germany intend to expand their joint cultural television channel arte into a European media platform (Der Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien). In 2025, the Second German Television (ZDF) presented its plan for a public-interest-oriented Digital Public Open Space (Dogruel et al.). There are many plans, but it remains to be seen whether they can be successfully realised in future. The drafts for a European media platform largely leave open the question of which values they intend to achieve and how. Only smaller projects promoting European news exchange and discourse have been established so far. One such project is the press review euro|topics – European Press Roundup, which monitors European discourses and translates the main contributions from leading newspapers into five languages. This project was founded by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, bpb) as early as 2005. A European Perspective (AEP) is a transnational European newsroom, launched by public service media in 2021. Its 23 member organisations from 17 countries exchange news and translate news using the AI-assisted EuroVox tool. In 2024, AEP launched YEP News (Your European Perspective), a multilingual news aggregator that reports on major European and global issues. Outline for a Common Good-Oriented European Platform for Journalism A compelling concept for such a platform is still lacking. While Twitter certainly opened up new possibilities for journalism, it was not primarily created to improve democracy. Therefore, simply copying it would not suffice. It would be better to first define the modules required for a European media platform that is oriented towards the common good. In line with the mission of public service media, such a platform could encompass journalism, education, advice, culture, and entertainment. This article, however, focusses on journalism, which contributes to the common good in two ways: by producing and disseminating news and comments, and by moderating public discourse. Unlike traditional mass media, digital platforms are not limited to the linear dissemination of news and comments. They also enable interactive communication, broad participation in the public discourse, and the archiving of verified news and justified opinions. Taking these digital capabilities into account, a matrix of journalistic platform modules can be developed that integrates dissemination, discourse, and archiving (table 1). These modules complement each other and are closely interconnected: news and comments distributed by the media provide ongoing opportunities for public discourse, during which their justification is questioned and clarified through argumentation. Validated news and opinions, along with their justifications, are stored in the archive and can be reintroduced into the process, serving as context for current events or providing argumentative support. However, they can also be corrected and supplemented themselves. Knowledge Assessment Journalistic intermediation Short-term: Production and dissemination News Comment Professional production and linear dissemination Medium-term: Public discourse Epistemic validation Opinion formation process Professional moderation (ensuring broad participation and deliberative quality of discourses) Long-term: Archiving Validated knowledge as context Documentation of opinion and its justification (pros and cons) Professional archiving and referencing Table 1: Modules of a journalistic platform The envisioned journalistic platform modules should connect three spatial levels: the local, national, and European. Yochai Benkler’s normative concept of an integrated networked public sphere, which he outlined back in 2006, is helpful here. The goal of this concept is to strike the right balance between openness and closedness in public discourse. Both are necessary, but also risky: openness brings participation and diversity, but also information overload, loss of news quality (disinformation), and rude discourse (hate speech). On the side of closedness, gatekeeping ensures news and discourse quality, but focussing attention on a small number of relevant topics (agenda-setting) can lead to a concentration of power and lack of diversity. According to Benkler, the tension between openness and closedness should be resolved by distributing specific tasks across the different levels of the public sphere and by the gradual processing of news and comments in different phases. This begins with a high degree of diversity in topics and related news and comments across numerous mini-publics at the local level, with strong citizen participation. This continues at the national and European level, mediated by journalistic selection and moderation. At the European level, exchanges between the national publics should be encouraged. At higher levels and in later phases, the publics merge and diversity in rational discourse is reduced when selection decisions are made about the relevance of topics, the accuracy of news, and the (better) justification of opinions. This narrowing of the focus in a bottom-up process should not be centralised or finalised. Rather than the “hard” selection decisions (gatekeeping) of traditional mass media, a recommendation-based approach and “soft” (revisable) selection process (gatewatching: see Bruns) should be adopted. This multi-level architecture helps to ensure that the concrete local experiences of citizens remain connected to the political decisions made at higher levels in distant capitals. Topics can be covered and discussed on platforms in the long term, with knowledge and opinions from the archive providing context. Of course, theories of democracy should not be the only normative benchmark for the European media platform. Additional modules are required to strengthen identity, community building, social cohesion, and connections between different lifeworld experiences (Bengesser). Steps Towards a Common Good-Oriented European Media Platform What steps are necessary for the design of such a European media platform? Digital transformation is an ongoing process of change, meaning that the conditions for realising democratic values are also perpetually changing (Coeckelbergh, Digital Humanism 3). This requires continuous learning and weighing up of new chances and risks. Appropriate learning environments include innovation labs (García-Avilés) and pioneer communities (Hepp and Loosen). This process of experimentation could be observed in the case of Twitter and is also currently evident in the field of generative artificial intelligence (Jungherr). Negative effects have become apparent, such as incorrect outputs, bias, unfairness, opacity, copyright violations, and environmental costs. Conversely, visions were developed on how to strengthen democracy with AI and how to democratise AI (Coeckelbergh, Undermines 70-119). There are already many AI applications that are conducive to democracy: LLM-powered chatbots can enhance news diversity (Heitz et al.), improve the quality of political discourse (Argyle et al.), and verify political information (Kuznetsova et al.). Pioneer communities such as the German AI for Media Network support systematic learning. An experimental approach is needed to exploit the opportunities and limits of digital technologies for democracy, following the concepts of “experimental democracy” by John Dewey and “piecemeal technology” by Karl R. Popper. Both authors recommended taking small, reversible steps to test new paths in democracy. In addition to the editorial development of a European media platform outlined here, the necessary institutional and legal frameworks must be created. If a new organisation is not established, existing public service media organisations should cooperate within the framework of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), for example. Furthermore, a political consensus must be reached among EU member states. This will certainly be the greatest challenge. The rise of right-wing populist parties and the erosion of democracy in several EU countries is both the main reason for taking measures to strengthen the European public sphere, but also the biggest obstacle. 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I (Breigha) came to Twitter at a time when it felt less like a platform and more like a space—one shaped not by algorithmic prediction, but by people. It was a space where humour, critique, and cultural expression moved quickly, often unpredictably, but with a kind of shared recognition. What would later be called Black Twitter was not a formal community, but a set of practices: ways of speaking, responding, witnessing, and making meaning together. That space was never perfect, but it was generative. It enabled forms of visibility that were difficult to sustain elsewhere. Over time, however, those conditions shifted, reorganised under pressures of scale, monetisation, and platform governance. What once felt like an expansion of possibility became increasingly structured by logics that rendered those same practices precarious. The story of Black Twitter is not simply one of emergence and decline; it illustrates a broader transformation in the design and governance of digital platforms—one that cannot be addressed through incremental reform alone. The heart of technology beats to the rhythms of modern social, economic, and political life. Yet the design logics and regulatory approaches that govern technological development have been disproportionately shaped by Silicon Valley and other Western industrial hubs. These principles, often presented as neutral or inevitable, are in fact deeply embedded in cultural and economic contexts that privilege profit over justice, efficiency over equity, and disruption over accountability (Flew, Regulating Platforms; Srnicek; Zuboff). The result is a sociotechnical order that amplifies existing inequalities while presenting itself as a universal and unavoidable trajectory of progress. Existing responses to these conditions—regulatory fixes, ethical guidelines, and frameworks for responsible innovation—have largely operated as after-the-fact adjustments layered onto infrastructures that remain fundamentally extractive (Thussu; Stilgoe et al.). While such interventions are necessary, they are insufficient. To meaningfully transform technology’s relationship to society, it is not enough to refine existing systems; we must also interrogate and undo the assumptions that shape their design and governance. We call this process unbecoming. Unbecoming operates in two interrelated senses. First, it names the misalignment between contemporary technological systems and democratic, justice-oriented values. Systems that reproduce racial hierarchies, amplify inequality, or privilege extraction over participation are not merely flawed—they are unbecoming of the societies they claim to serve (Benjamin; Noble; Wajcman). Second, unbecoming refers to a praxis of unlearning and dismantling: a deliberate effort to undo entrenched design logics, economic assumptions, and governance models in order to create space for alternative sociotechnical arrangements. Just as individuals sometimes need to unlearn habits or beliefs that no longer serve them, institutions and societies must actively unbecome in order to create space for more equitable and sustainable futures. To develop this framework, we trace the platformisation of the Internet through the trajectory of Twitter/X, examining how processes of scaling, monetisation, and governance transformation altered the conditions that once supported civic discourse and counterpublic formation. We then outline three principles for reimagining platform futures: socially informed capitalism, optimal scaling, and democratic governance. Together, these interventions position unbecoming as both a diagnostic lens and a practical orientation for rethinking how sociotechnical systems might be designed, governed, and sustained. Diagnosing Platformisation: When Infrastructure Turns Unbecoming The contemporary Internet is not simply a collection of tools, but a sociotechnical system structured by specific economic, political, and cultural logics (Plantin and Punathambekar). As van Dijck et al. argue, platforms increasingly organise public life itself, shaping how values such as equity, participation, and visibility are operationalised. To understand why current platforms so often fail to support equitable and democratic forms of social life, it is necessary to begin with a diagnosis of these underlying conditions. Unbecoming as Diagnosis It is within this context that unbecoming operates as a diagnostic term. Technologies that reproduce racial hierarchies, amplify gendered inequalities, or privilege extraction over participation are not merely flawed—they are fundamentally misaligned with the values they claim to support. At its most basic, unbecoming names the inappropriateness of current technological systems for marginalised users. Technologies that amplify racist stereotypes (Noble), reproduce racial hierarchies (Benjamin), or reinforce gendered inequalities (Wajcman) are not just flawed; they are unbecoming of a just and democratic society. This misalignment is not incidental but embedded in the design and governance of computational systems. Critical AI scholarship shows that such systems reproduce and intensify inequality through data and optimisation practices (Benjamin; Noble). As Benjamin argues, these processes encode racial hierarchies into seemingly neutral systems, while Noble demonstrates how algorithmic ranking privileges dominant groups; Browne situates these dynamics within longer histories of racialised surveillance, reframing platforms and AI as infrastructures of power rather than neutral tools. Importantly, this diagnosis extends beyond surface-level harms to the deeper logics that structure technological systems. Platform capitalism and surveillance capitalism (Srnicek; Zuboff) are not accidental outcomes but deliberate architectures that privilege data extraction and behavioural modification over wellbeing. To call these arrangements unbecoming is to insist that they are fundamentally misaligned with both democratic ideals and sustainable business models. This diagnosis, however, remains abstract without a concrete illustration of how such dynamics unfold over time. To make these processes visible, we turn to the platformisation of Twitter. Platformisation and the Logic of Extraction Initially heralded as a democratic and egalitarian technology, the Internet has become increasingly structured around corporate platforms that consolidate control, capture data, and monetise attention (Plantin and Punathambekar; Srnicek; Zuboff). This evolution illustrates not only the failures of regulatory approaches—often too slow, fragmented, or narrowly national to address global infrastructures—but also the failure of imagination in treating profit and justice as incompatible (Flew, Globalization). The challenge, then, is not simply to regulate platforms more effectively, but to rethink the values and practices that gave rise to them in the first place. The platformisation of the Internet led to the construction of micro-services associated with the delivery of pseudo-personalised feeds of social activity (Poell, Nieborg, and van Dijck). As Poell et al. argue, platformisation is not merely a technical shift but a broader reorganisation of cultural production, economic exchange, and governance through platform infrastructures. Generated algorithmically and on an alleged premise of personalisation, these streams of data are designed to appear on multiple screens and refresh at the behest of mysteriously programmed infrastructures, commonly labelled black box design (Costanza-Chock). Platformisation supports the packaging of data into small manageable chunks that can be refreshed, thus serving to update both the quality and the perceived value of the data feeds generated. The irony that scholars have not failed to point out is that users trade in their own private and personal data only to have them mixed up and served up in a menu of prescribed options; a social salad, to put it crudely, of personal drama, news, photos, and miscellaneous microbits of everyday occurrences. The privacy paradox involved at the heart of this structure rests on dubious legal terms (Fernback & Papacharissi; Papacharissi & Fernback) and a social contract that disregards context (Nissenbaum). We include the first references in the scholarly literature to these tendencies to reflect that scholarly concern pre-dated the platformisation of the Internet. Around the same time, Bruns described these tendencies as resting on an organisational logic that engaged citizens as both producers and consumers of data, termed produsage, supporting capabilities of ambient, always on feeds of refreshable data (Hermida). What might the Internet look like without platformisation? We caught only a brief glimpse of that possibility in early online communities—Usenet boards, personal homepages, blogs—before the Web became a nexus of monetised platforms. In their place, we have inherited a landscape of seemingly assembly-line mini apps that are increasingly ill-suited to the demands of civic and democratic life. To understand how this transformation occurred, we turn to Twitter/X—not as a bounded case, but as a site through which the processes of becoming and unbecoming can be traced over time. It offers a layered account of how platform infrastructures emerge, evolve, and, ultimately, erode the very conditions that once made them socially valuable. From Becoming to Collapse: Twitter as Sociotechnical Evidence Launched in 2006 as a way to send short, 140-character messages to small groups of people, Twitter, now commonly known as X, mystified the general public and only seemed to make sense to few who used it to type in inconsequential updates. Mass media sought to make sense of the phenomenon of people posting seemingly insignificant daily updates that featured what they had for breakfast, among other things. While the idea of food porn appears canonical and possibly even banal to mass audiences today, at the time, it appeared queer; in every interpretation of the word. The service appealed because it was precisely that: too weird for the norm to understand, yet inclusive of those who felt excluded elsewhere. What initially appeared as a marginal and even unintelligible platform quickly became a site of cultural experimentation, collective expression, and networked visibility (Wang et al.). In Twitter: A Biography, Burgess and Baym tell the story of the medium in a way that only someone who lived through the various iterations of a medium can. It is difficult for people to imagine today what we experienced at the time, which was the opening up of space that previously did not exist and was loose enough to accommodate things that were deemed unusual. The idea that these things that could not be uttered elsewhere could be verbalised online was immensely empowering for people (Nagy and Neff). The confined context surprised and engaged users who came up with all sorts of performative gestures, developing their own vernaculars of creative independence. In an early study of performative gestures on Twitter, I (Zizi) likened them to improv moves of breakdancers (Papacharissi). In my own field notes to the study, taken some time between 2008 and 2010, I had jokingly noted to myself that I don’t see white people. I had neither the data nor the positionality to write further on the mannerisms I was observing, but thankfully André Brock did, who submitted an article to the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. “From the Black Hand Side: Twitter as Cultural Conversation” illustrated the diversity the platform introduced in making space for Black Twitter become a place of connection and expression. As Brock later argues in Distributed Blackness, Black Twitter is not simply a site of participation but a networked cultural system through which Black users produce meaning, identity, and technological practice on their own terms. Yet these emergent forms of participation did not remain stable. As Twitter expanded, the conditions that enabled such practices were gradually reorganised under the pressures of scale, monetisation, and infrastructural consolidation. At around the same time, the co-editors of this issue were busy researching the revolutionary potential of the platform in connecting citizens and journalists in ways that fuelled social movements. In a parallel study I was running on the Arab Spring, I quietly asked Axel why I was having trouble opening the Twitter files I had downloaded, containing feeds prior and post the regime change that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. He kindly explained that I had probably grabbed tweets in millions, and I needed to break them up—I had never imagined the activity would be that voluminous, even though today it is something we are accustomed to. I broke up my files and did not have to clean them up for bot activity, because there were no bots, although there were a couple of impersonators that were easily detected. I chatted with Alfred, because his writing about ambient, always-on journalism was central to me understanding these feeds as affective news. In writing this piece with the lead author, Breigha Adeyemo, we do not have the opportunity to rejoice about these moments. Bots have surpassed human traffic online (Woollacott). The landscape has flipped. It was becoming something new and interesting back then. It is now unbecoming. The ability to say things that could not be verbalised elsewhere is now exploited on X, by enabling speech that is not civically friendly and typically hostile to democratic norms of conversation. To make matters worse, there is the issue of scale. Scale is often treated as a neutral marker of success in platform economies, yet it is one of the primary forces through which platforms turn unbecoming. As platforms scale, they do not simply accommodate more users; they reorganise social interaction around metrics, automation, and abstraction (Plantin and Punathambekar). What once was porous, improvisational, and context-sensitive becomes optimised for throughput, predictability, and monetisation. This trajectory aligns with what Cory Doctorow describes as the “enshittification” of platforms, a process through which digital services initially create value for users before gradually degrading that value in favour of advertisers and shareholders. In this sense, what appears as technical evolution is more accurately understood as a structural shift toward extraction. Architectural metaphors are useful here. Early platforms resemble flexible structures—open rooms that can be repurposed by inhabitants. As scale increases, these structures harden. Load-bearing walls are installed in the form of engagement metrics, algorithmic ranking systems, and advertising infrastructures. Once these elements are in place, meaningful renovation becomes difficult without destabilising the entire structure. These transformations were not experienced evenly. As the platform’s governance structures shifted, the burdens of algorithmic visibility, moderation, and extractive attention fell disproportionately on marginalised communities—as these burdens do not affect all users equally. As Gillespie notes, platforms do not simply host content but actively govern it, shaping participation through moderation, visibility, and policy decisions that carry significant social and political consequences. As I (Breigha) write alongside Zizi in this account, the transformation of Twitter into X is inseparable from the loss of Black Twitter—not simply as a cultural formation, but as a set of relational practices and norms that depended on specific platform conditions. These conditions included largely chronological visibility, weak algorithmic mediation, informal but effective community accountability, and low barriers to participation that supported vernacular expression and counterpublic formation. Platform affordances are not fixed features but emerge relationally through ongoing interactions between users, designers, and broader sociotechnical contexts (Bucher and Helmond; Evans et al.). In this sense, platforms do not simply structure sociality—they are themselves continuously (re)produced through it, aligning with longer traditions of sociotechnical co-construction (Nagy and Neff; Pinch and Bijker). As scholars and critics have documented, Black Twitter thrived under earlier affordances that enabled vernacular expression, contextual visibility, and collective accountability. As Clark argues, it functions not simply as a community but as a counterpublic—producing cultural meaning, political critique, and forms of networked visibility often marginalised elsewhere. As Brock further suggests, these practices reflect not only user behaviour but distinct modes of cultural and technological production shaped by, yet not reducible to, platform design. Over time, however, these conditions eroded as the platform scaled, monetizsed, and reoriented its governance priorities toward engagement optimisation. Algorithmic ranking, metric-driven visibility, and uneven moderation practices introduced forms of context collapse and extractive attention that disproportionately affected Black users, rendering previously viable modes of participation more precarious. While scaling introduced structural pressures that weakened the conditions under which Black Twitter flourished, Musk’s acquisition marked a decisive rupture—intensifying those vulnerabilities beyond repair. Governance norms were abandoned, trust-and-safety infrastructures destabilised, and harassment was reframed as free speech. What scale had strained, new ownership rendered untenable. In this context, user migration is not simply a reaction to platform decline, but part of a broader pattern in which publics become untenable within extractive systems. The migration away from Twitter by Black users thus reflects a broader pattern of unbecoming: when platforms scale toward extractive equilibrium, they often render the very publics that generated cultural and economic value untenable. In this sense, scale operates as a selective force, preserving forms of participation that align with dominant economic logics while displacing or marginalising those that require contextual sensitivity, collective norms, and care. As Tkacz and Gehl argue in their account of After Twitter, such migrations should not be understood as an anomaly or isolated response to platform mismanagement (or failure), but as part of a wider historical punctuation marked by fragmentation, the emergence of platform polities, and a shift from connective to protective forms of sociality. Taken together, Twitter’s trajectory illustrates a broader pattern: platforms do not simply fail; they turn unbecoming through the cumulative effects of design, economic imperatives, and governance. If these failures are structural rather than incidental, they cannot be meaningfully repaired—prompting a more urgent question: what would it mean to undo them? This question motivates unbecoming as a framework that moves beyond reform toward rethinking how such systems are designed, sustained, and dismantled. Unbecoming, then, requires more than regulatory “patches”. It demands architectural interventions: removing load-bearing assumptions, rezoning communicative spaces, and, crucially, accepting that not all systems—if any—should scale indefinitely. Scaling back is not a failure of innovation, but a necessary condition for equilibrium. In economic terms, it allows platforms to move toward sustainable utility rather than extractive growth. In social terms, it reintroduces context, accountability, and the possibility of publics that do not have to be legible—or profitable—to survive. Just as platforms turned unbecoming through unchecked scaling, contemporary AI systems risk repeating this trajectory. As Crawford argues, AI systems are not abstract computational tools but material and political infrastructures built on extractive relations—drawing on data, labour, and resources that are unevenly distributed across global and social hierarchies. In this sense, the trajectory of AI does not represent a departure from platform logics but an intensification of them, extending patterns of extraction and inequality into new domains. Foundation models are designed under assumptions of inevitability: more data, more parameters, more reach. Ethical interventions are layered onto architectures already optimised for extraction and control. We hope that unbecoming, as a concept, offers an alternative orientation– one that treats de-scaling, forgetting, and refusal as legitimate design practices. Unbecoming as Framework: Why Reform Is Not Enough Unbecoming emerges in response to the limits of reform-oriented approaches. While existing frameworks offer important tools for improving technological systems, they often assume that such systems can be incrementally adjusted without addressing the logics that produce harm in the first place. Popular discourse has begun to capture this pattern through terms such as “enshittification” (Doctorow), which describes how platforms initially create value for users before gradually degrading that value in favour of advertisers and investors. While such accounts are useful in naming the trajectory of platform decline, they often remain descriptive. Unbecoming extends this insight by offering a conceptual and praxis-oriented framework for understanding not only how platforms degrade, but how they might be actively dismantled and reimagined. Becoming involves the unbecoming or undoing of other options for consumers, as they are either consolidated or rendered useless—that is, their economic value is compromised, in ways that impact on their social utility for consumers (no updates, etc.). The result is a less porous communicative ecosystem. Defining Unbecoming The central contribution of this article lies in developing unbecoming as a conceptual and practical framework for rethinking technology design and governance. While prior scholarship has provided powerful critiques of technological inequality, and movements such as design justice have advanced important principles for equity, what remains underdeveloped is an account of how societies and institutions can actively dismantle entrenched logics before attempting to rebuild. Unbecoming offers such a framework by emphasising the necessity of undoing as a precursor to becoming otherwise. If unbecoming names the misalignment of existing systems, it also points toward a set of practices for addressing that misalignment. In this sense, unbecoming is not only diagnostic but also generative. Unbecoming as Praxis Beyond diagnosis, unbecoming functions as praxis: a set of practices aimed at unlearning, undoing, and dismantling extractive logics. Just as individuals may need to unlearn habits or assumptions that no longer serve them, societies must actively unbecome technological systems that perpetuate inequity. In this sense, unbecoming is not simply negative or destructive; it is generative. By clearing space of entrenched assumptions, unbecoming creates conditions for imagining and building alternative sociotechnical futures. This praxis requires more than incremental reform. Adding transparency mechanisms to exploitative systems or diversity initiatives to exclusionary cultures does not undo the logics that produced inequities in the first place (Costanza-Chock). Instead, unbecoming insists on more radical practices of dismantling: questioning why engagement metrics are prioritizsed over wellbeing, why profit is pitted against justice, and why regulation is imagined only as reactive constraint. Forgetting as a Metaphor for Unbecoming One way to conceptualise this process is through the metaphor of forgetting. Research has shown that forgetting is not merely a failure of memory but a functional process that allows humans to adapt, remain creative, and reimagine possibilities (Small). In therapeutic contexts, forgetting can help individuals unlearn harmful patterns in order to heal and grow. Applying this metaphor to technology design, unbecoming involves a form of collective forgetting: letting go of the logics, assumptions, and defaults that have shaped platforms and infrastructures. To unbecome is to forget the inevitability of platform capitalism, the neutrality of technological artifacts, and the false binary between profit and justice. Only by forgetting these entrenched beliefs can we remember and rebuild around values of equity, inclusion, and sustainability. Distinguishing Unbecoming from Adjacent Frameworks While this orientation resonates with existing approaches such as responsible innovation and design justice, it departs from them in important ways. Responsible innovation emphasises anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and responsiveness (Stilgoe et al.). Values-in-design (Friedman et al.) provides methodological tools for integrating ethics into design. Design justice (Costanza-Chock) prioritises community leadership in design processes. While valuable, these frameworks often assume that existing systems can be reformed through the addition of ethical considerations or participatory mechanisms. Unbecoming, by contrast, insists that reform cannot succeed without first dismantling the architectures that produce harm. It is not enough to retrofit inclusivity onto systems built for extraction; those systems must be unmade before alternatives can emerge. In this sense, unbecoming is complementary but distinct: it extends responsible innovation and design justice by foregrounding undoing as a necessary step in the cycle of innovation. If responsible innovation asks how to design for accountability, and design justice asks who gets to design, unbecoming asks what must be dismantled before any new design can take place. Toward Praxis-Oriented Frameworks Defining unbecoming in this dual sense—diagnosis and praxis—clarifies its role as both critique and construction. As diagnosis, it exposes the misalignment of current technological systems with democratic and justice-oriented values. As praxis, it offers a set of practices for unlearning and dismantling those systems in order to clear ground for alternatives. This dual function positions unbecoming as an essential bridge between theoretical critique and practical transformation. By foregrounding undoing as a necessary precondition for transformation, unbecoming shifts the focus from reforming systems to rethinking whether and how they should persist at all. The question then becomes not only what must be dismantled, but what might take its place. Designing Otherwise: Principles for Platform Futures If unbecoming provides a framework for diagnosing and dismantling existing systems, it must also inform how new sociotechnical arrangements are imagined and constructed. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, we outline a set of principles that follow from an unbecoming orientation. Socially Informed Capitalism First, unbecoming challenges the assumed opposition between profitability and social value. Placing social justice at the heart of venture capital is imperative. As foreign as this may sound, it is not impossible. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs prize innovation, and innovation, at present, is about creating technology that does not view democracy as an afterthought. The market is saturated with platforms that commodify larger processes in order to package and sell them into units. This is unnatural, for it forces deep learning and large learning to deliver micro-results that are destined to be inaccurate or incomplete. It further compounds consumer fatigue with technologies that interpellate people as active users only to reduce them to potential target markets. From Twitter’s early success, we learn that platforms with minimal pressure to monetise can foster socially generative practices. Before aggressive ad-targeting and engagement optimisation, Twitter actually supported counterpublic formation, civic discourse, and cultural production that exceeded its immediate commercial value. However, as pressures from venture capital intensified (e.g., the turn toward surveillance-driven advertising and engagement maximisation), these social practices were treated as raw material rather than social value. The assumption that people would not respond to platforms with a social conscience is unfounded. On the contrary, people typically creatively misuse platforms to infuse them with a social compass aligned with their own beliefs and values. Unbecoming involves doing away with past assumptions that separate profit from contributions of social value—that is, profitability and social contribution are not mutually exclusive. The pairing is not uncommon, and several economic models permit for it, without departing from a capitalist logic entirely. Consider, for example, a different venture logic—one that rewards long-term civic trust and democratic contribution. This might have sustained user practices, rather than extract from them. For Twitter/X, this would have meant refusing the conversion of social interaction into ad inventory and instead experimenting with hybrid revenue models, such as public-interest partnerships. For example, public health agencies might pay to use Twitter for verified crisis communication, or universities and civic organizations might support the platform in exchange for long-term access to tools used for research and teaching. This would of course require that economists, together with social scientists and engineers, work to create platforms, pushing aside the dominant MBA mentality that governs Silicon Valley ideology. Optimal Scaling and the Limits of Growth Second, unbecoming reframes scale not as an unquestioned good, but as a variable requiring active management. Becoming and unbecoming are processes connected to scale. In order to achieve critical mass a platform must become. At the same time, once a platform grows beyond optimal scale, it sacrifices authenticity for profit. It further attains a larger size that limits corrective practices. Twitter’s trajectory is a clear illustration of this tension. As the platform expanded, it increasingly relied on algorithmic ranking, engagement metrics, and automation to manage scale. These mechanisms helped to dilute context and amplify conflict while simultaneously reducing the platform’s capacity to self-correct. Undoing is easier at a smaller scale. While early Twitter was imperfect, as all platforms are, its smaller scale allowed for informal governance and community accountability. The founding assumption of venture capital is that growth is always desirable, yet economic principles teach us that optimisation, not unrestricted growth, is the sustainable path forward. Unbecoming reframes scale as a variable to be actively managed rather than an endpoint. Stability, rather than spurts in growth, could be rewarded, in exchange for platforms that cater to smaller groups, and are designed for dedicated publics; not for everyone. Rightsizing—that is, setting optimal scaling as part of the platform’s growth strategy—is the way of the future. It is not antithetical to capitalism. It is essential to how many industries develop, which makes one wonder why Silicon Valley economics would need to work in ways that are different. Such exceptionalism is less an economic necessity than an ideological commitment—one that unbecoming explicitly challenges. For Twitter/X, this would have meant embracing rightsizing as a design principle: accepting limits on growth and supporting smaller and possibly semi-autonomous publics. This stability could have been rewarded through investor incentives based on retention, trust, and public value rather than user growth alone. Democratic Governance as Design Principle Finally, unbecoming situates platforms within the broader context of democratic governance. Becoming and unbecoming practices connect the technology sector with democratic governance. In democratic societies, technologies are not external to democratic institutions; they shape public discourse, civic participation, and the conditions under which collective decision-making occurs. Regulation applies differently for technologies that were created with democratic goals at heart. Becoming a technology in a democratic society means being a part of the mechanisms that support and advance democratic structures and citizens, not merely complying with minimal legal requirements. Unbecoming implies undoing, so as to align with democratic values. In the case of Twitter/X, unbecoming would have required rethinking governance well before Musk acquired the platform: implementing durable, transparent oversight mechanisms and recognising that moderation, visibility, and amplification are forms of political power. Musk did not break a healthy Twitter; he took control of a platform that had never been designed to protect democratic values in the first place. His acquisition simply exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities. Applying unbecoming to policy thus means treating social media platforms like Twitter/X as democratic actors whose legitimacy depends on alignment with democratic values. This includes not only regulation after harm occurs, but structural requirements around public accountability and participatory oversight. Unbecoming, here, is the deliberate undoing of platform designs and ownership models that concentrate power without democratic responsibility. Taken together, these principles do not offer a blueprint for ideal platforms, but rather a reorientation of how technological systems are designed, evaluated, sustained, and, when necessary, undone. Conclusion: Choosing What We Build—and Unbuild The crises currently facing digital platforms are not aberrations, but outcomes of design logics that have long been treated as inevitable. Through the example of Twitter/X, we have shown how platforms become unbecoming—not simply through misuse, but through the cumulative effects of extraction, scale, and weak democratic alignment. Unbecoming, as we have developed it here, offers both a diagnosis of this misalignment and a praxis for moving beyond it. By foregrounding undoing as a necessary precursor to becoming otherwise, the framework challenges the assumption that technological progress must occur through continual growth, consolidation, and abstraction. 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Introduction The 2024 documentary film Eternal You, directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, threw into sharp relief a phenomenon that had been expanding for years: artificial intelligence startups offering bereaved individuals the opportunity to interact with digital simulations of their deceased loved ones. The scale of this phenomenon is suggested by a demographic projection: depending on user growth rates, the number of deceased profiles on Facebook is expected to exceed the number of living users before the end of the century, creating what has been described as a "digital graveyard" (Ambrosino). As foundational scholarship across sociology, law, and philosophy has documented over the past decade, digital technologies have fundamentally altered the presence of the dead in social life, raising questions about cultural practice (Walter), legal frameworks, and the ethical status of digital remains (Stokes). What has received less attention is the commercial infrastructure that has grown up to manage and monetise those remains, along with the long history of the human desire for immortality that such infrastructure exploits. Öhman and Floridi offer the most systematic account to date about these issues, introducing the concept of the Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI) as an umbrella term for commercial enterprises that monetise the digital remains of deceased Internet users. Their analysis identifies four types of service: information management, online memorials, posthumous messaging, and re-creation services (Öhman and Floridi 644). They argue that all share a structural economic incentive: to display the "informational bodies" of the dead, meaning the data and digital traces that come to stand in for the deceased, not in their most accurate form, but in their most consumable one. They contend that this incentive constitutes a form of alienation in the Marxian sense: the dead person’s identity is reshaped to serve commercial ends rather than their own, a distortion that amounts to a violation of human dignity. As a regulatory response, they propose that the ethical conventions governing trade in organic bodily remains—particularly the codes of conduct developed by archaeological and medical museums—might serve as a model for the governance of digital remains. More recently, Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska have extended this analysis to re-creation services specifically, identifying three categories of stakeholder whose interests are implicated in any posthumous simulation: the data donor whose personal data is used to construct the simulation, the data recipient who receives access to those data and produces the representation, and the service interactant who engages with the resulting simulation (Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska 63). The divergence of these interests, they argue, is the source of the most serious ethical risks posed by an industry that outpaces existing legal and normative frameworks. These accounts are important and largely persuasive. Yet they share a significant limitation: both treat the problem as structurally novel, as if the ethical questions surrounding posthumous representation had no serious precedent, and as if the regulatory task were one of constructing frameworks from scratch. The analogy to museum ethics, while suggestive, reaches back only to the late twentieth century and does not engage with the longer history of technologies specifically designed to represent the dead. This article argues that such a history exists and that it matters. Drawing on the history of post-mortem photography in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and America, it shows that the emergence of photography as a technology of posthumous representation generated strikingly similar normative anxieties—over the propriety of depicting the dead, the rights of bereaved families, and the commercial interests shaping such depictions. By examining how those anxieties were variously negotiated, institutionalised, or rendered invisible, the article offers a historical complement to existing frameworks for governing the digital afterlife industry, one that complicates the rhetoric of novelty and reveals the longer cultural logic within which contemporary technologies of posthumous simulation operate. Photography as a Technology of Posthumous Representation When photography emerged as a practical medium in the 1840s, one of its earliest and most widespread commercial applications was the representation of the deceased. Post-mortem photography, the practice of photographing the dead before burial, flourished across Britain and America from the 1840s through the early twentieth century, generating a set of normative questions that bear striking resemblance to those now posed by the digital afterlife industry. In America, the practice was openly commercial from the outset. Professional photographers discussed techniques for photographing the dead matter-of-factly in trade journals. As Jay Ruby documents, Josiah Southworth of Southworth and Hawes of Boston recalled in an 1873 panel discussion how he would dress the deceased and lay them on a sofa "just as if they were in a sleep", so that the resulting portrait would suggest life rather than death (Ruby 54). The demand was driven by the desire to secure some lasting image of the lost before the possibility disappeared entirely. Ruby’s title—Secure the Shadow—borrows from a Victorian advertising slogan that captures this impulse with uncomfortable precision: "Secure the shadow, ’ere the substance fade". Ruby also observes that the practice did not disappear with the nineteenth century. It persists into the present, but invisibly: because anyone can now take such photographs privately, and because social stigma discourages open acknowledgement, the practice has become widespread but unacknowledged. Ruby notes that mourners who acquire such images tend to show them only to trusted intimates (60). The drive to suppress the signs of death could extend beyond the suggestion of sleep to the outright simulation of life. Ruby documents a variation he terms "alive, yet dead": bodies were sometimes placed upright in chairs, and eyes that had closed in death were painted open so that the resulting portrait could be displayed in the parlour (72). The commercial logic underlying this practice was not confined to photographers alone. Ruby cites evidence that funeral directors in the period from 1880 to 1920 routinely described their work in terms of people asleep, deliberately blurring the distinction between life and death (72). The British case, as Audrey Linkman demonstrates, reveals a different but related dynamic. Post-mortem portraiture was practised across the social spectrum in Victorian Britain, yet it remained absent from public discourse. Photographers who undertook such commissions typically distanced themselves from the work in print, describing it as unpleasant or distasteful even as they continued to accept it. What united British practitioners was a shared aesthetic and ethical strategy: to represent the dead not as dead, but as peacefully asleep (Linkman 335). Through careful management of lighting, pose, and drapery, photographers suppressed the signs of death and substituted the suggestion of undisturbed repose. The post-mortem portrait in Victorian Britain thus functioned not as a memento mori but as a palliative: an image designed to ease grief by softening the finality of loss. This reveals a deeper normative logic. The bereaved did not commission post-mortem photographs because they wanted an accurate record of death. They commissioned them because they wanted an image that would allow continued emotional connection with the deceased—one that suppressed what was disturbing and preserved what was consoling. The tension Öhman and Floridi identify in the contemporary digital afterlife industry—between the "accurate" and the "consumable" representation of the dead (648)—was thus already operative in the Victorian photographic studio. Then as now, the technology of posthumous representation was shaped by the emotional needs of the bereaved, the commercial interests of providers, and the social norms governing the acceptable depiction of death. The history of post-mortem photography is instructive for contemporary debate in two respects. First, the preponderance of post-mortem portraits featuring infants and young children points to the intensity of grief for lives cut short before any photographic record existed. For parents of children who died in infancy, the post-mortem photograph served not only as a memorial but as proof of existence: evidence that the child had lived at all. This function finds a direct contemporary parallel in the use of AI simulation services by the bereaved following sudden or premature deaths, where the desire to extend or recover a relationship is especially acute. Second, the practice generated genuine moral controversy. In Britain, photographers themselves regarded post-mortem work as distasteful, and the subject could provoke strong antagonism (Linkman 312). In twentieth-century America, the private use of such images came to be widely regarded as morbid and unhealthy, on the belief that material remembrances of the dead prolonged grief (Ruby 25). These objections—that post-mortem photographs were ghoulish, that they confused the living and the dead, and that they risked prolonging grief rather than resolving it—map with remarkable precision onto contemporary critiques of griefbots and deadbots. Patterns of Normative Negotiation How, then, did Victorian societies come to terms with post-mortem photography? The answer is not that they resolved the ethical questions it raised. It is that they developed a range of practical accommodations—partial, culturally variable, and often unstable—that allowed the practice to continue while managing its most disruptive implications. These patterns of normative negotiation offer the most instructive contribution that photographic history can make to contemporary debates about the digital afterlife industry. Three distinct trajectories are visible in the historical record. The first is institutionalisation: the transformation of an initially contested practice into a stable social ritual. Victorian Britain never achieved this outcome, but a comparative example illuminates what such a settlement looks like. In East Asian mortuary culture, known in Japan as iei (遺影), in Korea as yeongjeong (영정), and in China as yíxiàng (遗像), the formal portrait photograph of the deceased is displayed at the funeral altar and subsequently enshrined in the domestic space, achieving a degree of ritual integration that its Victorian counterpart never attained in the West. As Joshua Irizarry's ethnographic research in Japan documents, speaking to such portraits, or carrying a smaller copy when travelling, is entirely unremarkable, since the spirit of the deceased is understood to inhabit the image and to require regular interaction with the living. The photograph chosen for the iei tends to reflect how the living wish to remember the deceased rather than how the deceased appeared at the time of death (Irizarry S163). In this trajectory, normative anxiety is absorbed into ceremony: the practice is bounded by clear conventions governing who commissions the image, how it is displayed, and what relationship the living are expected to maintain with it. The second trajectory is invisibilisation: the continuation of a practice under conditions of social silence. This is the pattern Ruby identifies in contemporary American post-mortem photography. The practice persists, but because it takes place in private and is rarely acknowledged publicly, it escapes sustained normative scrutiny. The anxiety does not disappear; it is simply displaced into discretion. This trajectory does not represent a failure of normative development so much as a particular kind of settlement, one in which the practice is tacitly permitted provided it remains out of sight. The cost of this settlement is that those who engage in the practice are denied social acknowledgement and support, a dynamic that Ruby regards as harmful. The third trajectory is contested persistence: the continuation of a practice amid ongoing, unresolved moral debate. This was the dominant pattern in Victorian Britain, where post-mortem photography was neither ritually institutionalised nor publicly silenced, but maintained in a condition of low-level social discomfort. As Linkman notes, post-mortem work was rarely discussed in the specialist photographic press (310). Photographers accepted commissions they found distasteful (312); families displayed portraits they did not discuss with strangers; critics objected without achieving prohibition. The practice occupied an ambiguous normative space. These three trajectories share a structural feature: in none of them did normative settlement take the form of explicit ethical resolution. Victorian society does not appear to have reached any single, decisive moment of formal ethical resolution at which it determined that post-mortem photography was acceptable or unacceptable, governed by clear principles of consent, dignity, or proportionality. Settlement came through practice, through the gradual accumulation of conventions, rituals, and tacit understandings that made the technology socially manageable without making it ethically transparent. This observation has direct implications for the governance of the digital afterlife industry. Öhman and Floridi call for regulatory frameworks modelled on the ethics of museum practice. The historical record does not undermine this proposal. What it does suggest, however, is that formal regulatory frameworks are likely to be only one element of a broader and less tidy process of social negotiation, and that the outcomes of that process are neither predictable nor uniform. The Digital Afterlife Industry in Historical Perspective The historical patterns identified in the preceding sections do not merely provide an analogy for contemporary debates. They offer an analytical resource for understanding the ethical structure of the digital afterlife industry itself. This becomes clear when the history of post-mortem photography is read alongside the stakeholder framework developed by Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska, who identify three distinct parties whose interests are implicated in any re-creation service: the data donor, whose personal data are used to construct the simulation; the data recipient, who receives access to those data and produces the representation; and the service interactant, who engages with the resulting deadbot or digital avatar. In the digital context, a further party may be implicated as well: the data owner who controls the data from which a simulation is built, and who need not be the data donor. Their divergence is the source of the most serious ethical risks posed by re-creation services. What the history of post-mortem photography reveals is that this tripartite structure of conflicting interests is not a novel feature of AI-enabled posthumous representation. It is the constitutive condition of any technology designed to represent the dead. In the Victorian photographic studio, the data donor—the deceased—was by definition incapable of consent. The data recipient—the photographer, who received access to the body and produced the portrait—exercised commercial judgment in shaping the representation. The service interactant—the bereaved family and friends who viewed the portrait—expected an image that confirmed rather than disturbed their relationship to the deceased. As Linkman demonstrates, the convergence of data recipient and service interactant interests consistently produced one representational outcome: the suppression of the signs of death in favour of the consoling fiction of sleep. The data donor’s interest in accurate representation—the integrity of the "informational body" (Öhman and Floridi 649)—was subordinated to the consumable image demanded by those who remained alive, as it is in the Japanese iei tradition (Irizarry S163). This historical insight reframes the three trajectories as differing configurations of stakeholder interest. Institutionalisation structures the interests of all three parties by ritual convention, with the data donor represented according to established aesthetic norms and the data recipient’s role publicly defined. Invisibilisation marginalises the data donor most sharply: the practice continues in private, driven by service interactants and enabled by data recipients who operate without public scrutiny. Contested persistence occupies an intermediate position, leaving the data donor’s interests exposed to commercial and emotional pressures in the absence of settled norms. The historical parallel has limits that are themselves instructive. Post-mortem photographs were static objects: once made, they could not be updated, extended, or made to speak. The deadbot, by contrast, is generative and capable of producing new responses, new expressions of apparent emotion, and new interactions indefinitely. This generativity fundamentally alters the dynamics of invisibilisation. A Victorian family could display a post-mortem portrait discreetly, in a private room, without ongoing commercial entanglement. A bereaved person who interacts with an AI simulation remains embedded in a commercial platform, generating data, sustaining subscriptions, and potentially deepening dependency over time. The desire for immortality, or at least for some durable trace of the lost, is not a product of the digital age. But the infrastructure that now monetises that desire is without historical precedent in its reach, its persistence, and its capacity to shape grief itself. At present, the digital afterlife industry operates largely outside any dedicated regulatory framework. Re-creation services are typically governed, if at all, by general data-protection and consumer-protection law, none of which was designed with posthumous simulation in mind. Because the deceased lack legal personality, they hold no enforceable interest in how their data are used; consent, where it is sought at all, is obtained from the bereaved rather than from the data donor; and no established convention requires providers to disclose the artificial nature of a simulation, to limit emotionally manipulative design, or to specify how a deadbot is to be retired. The result is an industry whose commercial incentives are largely unchecked by either law or settled norm (Öhman and Floridi; Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska). Both Öhman and Floridi and Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska call for explicit regulatory frameworks to protect the dignity and interests of the data donor: requirements for meaningful consent, transparency about the artificial nature of simulations, and sensitive procedures for retiring deadbots. The historical record supports the urgency of such proposals. It also counsels realism about their likely effects. Formal regulation addresses the institutionalisation trajectory: it creates public frameworks, establishes conventions, and acknowledges competing interests. It does not, by itself, prevent invisibilisation, the migration of the practice into private spaces where regulatory oversight cannot easily reach, nor does it resolve the deeper social ambivalence that produces contested persistence. The digital afterlife industry is likely to follow all three trajectories simultaneously, differentiated by cultural context, economic circumstance, and the character of the loss being mourned. Governing it effectively will require not only ethical principles and legal frameworks but sustained attention to the social processes through which normative accommodation occurs. Conclusion The conversation about AI-enabled posthumous simulation is not as new as it appears. The emergence of post-mortem photography in the nineteenth century confronted societies with a structurally analogous set of problems: how to manage a technology that promised to extend the presence of the dead, whose commercial deployment created incentives to represent the deceased in consumable rather than accurate form, and whose use implicated the potentially divergent interests of the deceased, those who received access to their remains, and those who sought comfort in the resulting representations. The normative settlements that eventually emerged were not the product of explicit ethical deliberation or formal regulatory action. They were the outcome of a long, uneven, and culturally variable process of social negotiation, producing institutionalisation in some contexts, invisibilisation in others, and contested persistence in others still. This historical perspective does not counsel passivity in the face of the digital afterlife industry’s expansion. It counsels realism. Regulatory frameworks and ethical guidelines are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The history of posthumous photography suggests that technologies of posthumous representation tend to persist, driven by the human need to secure the shadow, to hold onto some image of the lost before the substance fades entirely. The task for scholars, policymakers, and platform designers is not to resolve that need, but to create the conditions under which it can be met with dignity, transparency, and appropriate care for all whose interests are at stake. References Ambrosino, Brandon. "Facebook as a Growing and Unstoppable Graveyard." BBC Future, 14 Mar. 2016. 14 Mar. 2026 ‹http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160313-the-unstoppable-rise-of-the-facebook-dead›. Eternal You. Dirs. Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck. Farbfilm Verleih, 2024. Hollanek, Tomasz, and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska. "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: On Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry." Philosophy and Technology 37.2 (2024). Irizarry, Joshua A. "Signs of Life: Grounding the Transcendent in Japanese Memorial Objects." Signs and Society 2.S1 (2014): S160–S187. Linkman, Audrey. "Taken from Life: Post-Mortem Portraiture in Britain 1860–1910." History of Photography 30.4 (2006): 309–47. Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. "The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry." Minds and Machines 27.4 (2017): 639–62. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995. Stokes, Patrick. "Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live On in Facebook?" Philosophy and Technology 25.3 (2012): 363–79. Walter, Tony. "Communication Media and the Dead: From the Stone Age to Facebook." Mortality 20.2 (2015): 133–43.

The concept of ambient journalism emerged to describe how digital platforms, particularly Twitter, enabled wide and incidental news consumption. I defined it as a broad, asynchronous, lightweight, and always-on communication system that enabled citizens to maintain a “mental model” of news, with Twitter highlighted as a leading example (Hermida, Twittering the News 297). However, the last decade has seen significant changes in the digital media environment. Twitter, now rebranded as X, has significantly declined in importance as a platform for journalists, politicians, celebrities, and the public. In this article, I revisit the theoretical foundations of ambient journalism. It examines how the concept and its connection to Twitter have evolved since 2010, reflecting the rise and fall of platforms, the increase in algorithmic curation, and the fragmentation of public attention. The decline of Twitter as a central hub for journalistic activity, competition from alternative platforms, the spread of mis- and disinformation, and the role of artificial intelligence in news curation have all contributed to a more complex ambient news environment. This development has shifted ambient journalism from a focus on collective intelligence toward an algorithmically driven stream that privileges affective resonance over narrative continuity, often leading to atomised rather than shared mental models. Looking ahead, the rise and rapid diffusion of generative AI raise questions about whether there is now an epistemological turn toward synthetic ambience. Synthetic ambience describes a phenomenon where human-like AI bots and generative AI summaries reshape how information flows. I analyse these changes, arguing that the move to algorithmic and synthetic ambience requires a critical rethinking of how news is experienced, understood, and verified in a post-Twitter world. The Roots of Ambient Journalism With the emergence and growth of social media platforms in the early 2000s, it became common for the public to share, document, and discuss news, experiences, and opinions. Twitter’s architecture was ideal for news, with its reverse-chronological format, immediacy, follower structure, and the ability to connect diverse messages through hashtags (Burgess and Baym 33). The platform thrived on expectations of sharing and public engagement, as shown in retweets, replies, and direct messages. Reports of major events like plane crashes and earthquakes often first appeared on Twitter, frequently from people involved, with the platform acting as “a nervous system for the planet” (Hermida, Tell Everyone 134). Drawing on the concept of awareness systems from ubiquitous computing, I defined ambient journalism as “an awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information, serving diverse purposes” (Hermida 301). The concept was developed in the context of Twitter as a media environment characterised by immediacy, serendipity, and the blending of professional and citizen journalism (Goode 1288). The original ambient journalism framework marked a departure from traditional, intentional consumption, like reading a newspaper or watching a TV news bulletin. The main features of ambient journalism were immediacy, unexpected discoveries, and the blending of professional and citizen journalism enabled by Twitter. Its architecture, with a reverse-chronological feed, a 140-character limit, and a social graph-based network structure, supported what Axel Bruns called produsage, where publics act as both users and producers of information. In this ambient environment, retweeting was not just an engagement metric but a curatorial act of journalism. This reflects a broader shift in digital journalism research toward the news ecosystem and landscape, including ambient and networked forms of journalism emerging from social media practices (Steensen and Ahva 1). The ambient news landscape has changed as platforms have developed. Algorithm-driven feeds, misinformation, and alternative sites have made the environment more fragmented and unpredictable. Where Twitter once served as a key, real-time hub during breaking news, from natural disasters to elections, now no single platform fully serves that connecting role. Newsrooms that previously relied on Twitter as an informal wire service now need to monitor multiple platforms, each with its own algorithms and norms. For audiences, losing a shared ambient space means that breaking news no longer appears through a common stream but arrives unevenly, reaching different groups at different times. This results in a more scattered, algorithmically curated mosaic that challenges the idea of ambient journalism and calls for a rethinking and redefining of the term. Networked Publics, Uneven Power The concept of a pervasive, participatory news ecosystem enabled by digital platforms, particularly Twitter, was based on users acting as both producers and consumers of news and information. Driven by the socio-technical structures of social networking sites, users formed networked publics where news was co-created and shared (boyd). Scholars have examined Twitter as a public space for networked publics during events like natural disasters, protests, or political instability, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement. The activist movements of the early 2010s exemplified the participatory and collective nature of ambient journalism, with Twitter serving as the link that allowed like-minded individuals to connect, communicate, and organise (Hermida, Tell Everyone 187; Papacharissi 52). Over the past decade, research has questioned the participatory concept of ambient journalism. Scholars have challenged the idea of Twitter as a mirror of public opinion (Mellon and Prosser 6; Mitchell and Hitlin par. 13), even though journalists frequently used tweets as a measure of the vox populi (Beckers and Harder 910). They viewed it as a helpful tool for newsgathering (McGregor and Molyneux 607) or to showcase ordinary people’s opinions (Tworek par. 1). While Twitter promoted an ambient awareness system, ambient journalism overlooked the power disparities between those who are seen and heard on specific issues at certain times (Hermida, Tell Everyone 101). Twitter was never a town square representing all voices. Only a minority of citizens used it, and only a minority of those users were highly active (Leetaru et al. par. 7). Accounts managed by journalists, politicians, celebrities, and bloggers were overrepresented among heavy users and dominated attention, giving them outsized influence on the network. A study on COVID-19 news sharing shows that 14 percent drove most circulation, and these creators accounted for 82 percent of false content in the dataset (Castioni et al. 1). The presence of a small group of active and influential users explains how Twitter became a key arena for highlighting important topics and political signals, even if it did not reflect the views of the broader public (Robertson). This concentration created a steady stream of signals such as retweets, replies, and metrics that spread widely beyond the core participants. Ambient journalism explains why Twitter changed how publics matter. Although the wider effects on the public sphere remain debated, this ambient environment provided a platform for networked publics to influence which stories are told and how, especially for place-based news events (Barnard 14; Bruns and Highfield 332). Taken together, these dynamics demonstrate how ambient journalism affected newsroom judgment in real time by making audience signals more immediate and difficult to ignore, without displacing editorial authority. Shifts in Platform Infrastructure Since 2010, the technological infrastructure underpinning ambient journalism has undergone a radical shift. My original conceptualisation was tethered to the affordances of early Twitter. The contemporary social media landscape, including Twitter, is defined by an algorithmic turn. In March 2016, the platform moved to algorithmic curation based on the presumed interests, preferences, and tastes of users, unless people chose to opt out. This shift transformed the ambient experience from a social utility that helps people keep up with friends and news into a relevance engine optimising passive watch time. For ambient journalism, it represented a significant shift. The ambient news in a feed became less about reflecting the priorities of a user’s connections and more about mirroring their individual habits and cues. While algorithms can help surface engaging content, they can also prioritise sensational or polarising stories over those that serve the public interest (Dujeancourt and Garz 264). The lack of transparency around algorithms exacerbates these issues, as people are often unaware of the biases and incentives shaping their news feeds. They amplify some tweets while reducing the visibility of others, playing a crucial yet hidden role in gatekeeping on Twitter (Huszár et al. 1). The mental model of news and events shifts from being based on the collective intelligence of the network (Malone et al. 2) to the social power of algorithms (Beer 1). Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022 and its rebranding as X in 2023 marked a turning point for ambient journalism, as the billionaire reshaped the socio-technical infrastructures underpinning the platform. He sought to reinvent it as a versatile utility, shifting from its original event-based microblogging to accommodate long-form posts and extended videos. Verification, once a symbol of trust for public figures and journalists, shifted to a subscription model based on payment rather than prominence. Musk has used the rhetoric of free speech to justify dismantling trust-and-safety teams and reinstating previously banned extremist and deceptive accounts. His portrayal as a free speech absolutist is mostly self-promotional branding rather than a consistent principle. In practice, his leadership of X has been characterised by selective enforcement, indicating that his priority is to control narratives rather than to foster open dialogue (See). These structural changes triggered cascading effects on the ambient journalism environment. The dismantling of trust-and-safety infrastructure, along with X’s withdrawal from third-party content-monitoring partnerships, undermined confidence in the platform. A more permissive moderation policy has encouraged a cultural acceptance of extreme and violent rhetoric, further degrading the quality of ambient news streams (de Keulenaar et al.). Many left-leaning academics, journalists, and news organisations reduced their presence on X or moved to alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon (Ng and Ray 1), hollowing out the very network of professional and civic voices that supported ambient journalism on the platform. The overall result was a more unpredictable, volatile, and untrustworthy news and information environment. Collectively, Musk’s actions tore down Twitter as a place where weak ties formed the connective tissue of public conversation and, more broadly, led to “the waning of ideals in relation to the communicative potentials of the open web more generally” (Tkacz and Gehl 1). Fragmentation, Fatigue, and Fabrication The original framework for ambient journalism proposed that ubiquitous information flows would help citizens develop a mental model of public affairs through peripheral awareness of news content. Twitter was one of many ambient systems that created conditions for incidental exposure to news, with people encountering news passively rather than intentionally seeking it out (Schäfer 242). Ambient journalism predicted that news consumption would become ubiquitous, fragmented, and incidental, but it overestimated how much this peripheral exposure would help build knowledge. Instead, a decade of research shows that for many people, constant connectivity leads to less coherent understanding, increased cognitive fragmentation, and psychological stress (Bawden and Robinson par. 3). Since 2010, the relentless flow of updates has intensified, with a proliferation of platforms, smartphones, and push services, let alone major news events from Brexit to COVID-19 to Trump’s elections. Ambient infrastructures have become too successful, leading to a reaction against the very awareness systems I described. When the flow becomes too much, people have sought to limit exposure, actively avoiding updates and further coverage. While news avoidance is a complex and multilayered phenomenon (Andersen et al. 1367), it is partly driven by feelings of news overload, fatigue, and paralysis (Newman et al. 35). Ambient journalism does not create mental models of news but instead increases the cognitive load on audiences. For many, the sheer volume of news feels overwhelming and harmful to their well-being, with the constant focus of newsrooms on conflict and crisis leading to emotional exhaustion (Toff et al. 3). At the same time, the fragmentation of the social media landscape and the splintering of audiences across different platforms with unique algorithmic logics, content norms, and user demographics mean that ambient journalism can no longer be understood through just one platform. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn influence much of the casual news consumption, each offering different features that impact how news is presented, encountered, and interpreted. TikTok’s short videos and Instagram’s visual, story-driven format create experiences that are different from the text-based and conversational style of Twitter. The design logics of TikTok and Instagram have altered how people encounter and make sense of news. TikTok centres an algorithmically driven For You stream that learns from viewing behavior and surfaces clips that fit personal interests. This creates an incidental and episodic flow driven by affect and momentary relevance more than by ongoing narratives or social ties. Similarly, Instagram Stories pull content into a visual, short-lived format, creating a highly visual, ephemeral environment. In a high-choice and fragmented media landscape, the lightweight, always-on nature of ambient journalism can hinder rather than help understanding. These pressures intensify during crises. While mis- and disinformation are far from novel, the networked, digital media environment has amplified the scale, speed, and reach of false information (Waisbord 1866). Ambient news streams have become polluted with a chaotic mix of mis- and disinformation, rumors, hate, and emotional outbursts, making it hard to distinguish between credibility and noise. These trends have accelerated since Musk took control of Twitter, increasing the reach of toxic content. While it was once “widely lambasted as a cesspool of vanity and triviality” (Puschmann et al. 425), it is now condemned as a “sewer” polluted by disinformation, harassment, and hate (Hammond-Errey). The shift from cesspool to sewer marks a notable escalation. Early criticisms focussed on the platform’s obsession with triviality, self-promotion, and banality. Now the criticism emphasises a space where disinformation, coordinated harassment, and hate speech not only coexist with news but actively pollute it. The shift to algorithmic curation favours sensational and polarising content over credible reporting (Dujeancourt and Garz 264), while X has lost the institutional checks that once helped moderate the platform’s most extreme issues. The pay-for-verification model has removed the heuristics that helped users distinguish reliable sources from unreliable ones. The result is a fundamentally changed incentive system where news pollution is financially rewarded, algorithmically amplified, and institutionally unchecked (Hermida et al. par. 1). This weakens trust, spurs inaction and news fatigue, and contributes to polarised views (Hasell and Halversen 1448; Tandoc and Kim 1187). Discussion The core of ambient journalism, that news and information would shift from a discrete product to a pervasive environment, has largely occurred as people encounter these through networked, asynchronous, and always-on communication infrastructures. The background flow of updates from various sources, not solely journalists, has become the primary information environment for many, particularly those under 34 years old (Newman et al. 12). For these audiences, news is less an appointment and more an atmosphere. No single item constitutes the whole story. Instead, people encounter continuously updated slivers of information. The evolution of the media environment and news habits highlights the limitations of the initial, more optimistic framing of ambient journalism. Fragmented attention, mis- or disinformation, and news fatigue have undermined the value of peripheral awareness for audiences. What was once considered a tool for collective intelligence now poses risks of anxiety, fragmentation, and news avoidance. The widespread use of algorithmic curation has reshaped ambient flows, prioritising attention over informing the public. The importance of Twitter has diminished with the rise and growing use of competing platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and AI-powered aggregators. Musk’s purchase and the era of X have increased uncertainty about how news is surfaced and consumed, creating a more unpredictable environment where visibility can surpass verification. As many journalists and news organisations reduce their use of X (Ng and Ray 1), its role as a place for ambient awareness, especially during breaking news, becomes more contested and less central than it was in the 2010s. It is even questionable whether X remains a platform for ambient journalism. Algorithmic curation on X now actively de-prioritises quality journalism in favour of content that maximises engagement, while the platform’s financial incentive structure rewards the most attention-grabbing posts regardless of their veracity or public value (Dujeancourt and Garz 264). The dismantling of trust-and-safety infrastructure, the shift to pay-for-verification, and the reinstatement of previously banned accounts have collectively undermined the good-faith assumptions on which ambient journalism relied. In these conditions, what persists on X may be better understood as ambient information noise rather than ambient journalism. In a sense, the epistemological foundations that justified the term journalism have been so thoroughly compromised that the label risks lending unwarranted legitimacy to a deeply polluted environment. X still generates ambient awareness, but whether that awareness constitutes a form of journalism, even in the loose, peripheral sense originally intended, is highly questionable. Ambient journalism has, then, outgrown Twitter, prompting a re-evaluation of the concept to address the complex, algorithmically mediated, and uneven ways in which news is encountered and understood, incorporating affective resonance (Mühlhoff 1001). To account for the socio-technical and cultural changes since 2010, ambient journalism can now be defined as incidentally consumed, algorithmically guided streams of episodic news and information fragments that privilege affective resonance over narrative continuity, fostering atomised rather than collective mental models of public events. This definition recognises an epistemological shift in the infrastructures of news and information. It captures the shift from receiving news and information in fixed editions from authoritative sources to a persistent, pervasive flow of snippets from numerous voices. Outlook Recent and ongoing socio-technical advances in artificial intelligence could ultimately challenge the very concept of ambient news. Here, I introduce the term synthetic ambience, which describes a phenomenon where the ambient news environment is increasingly shaped by AI-generated content that mimics the look and rhythms of human journalism, rather than by human journalists or networked publics. AI-generated signals imitate, compress, and ultimately replace the organic flows that ambient journalism once relied on. Synthetic ambience suggests an epistemological turn, signaling a move from social ambience, rooted in networked publics, to algorithmic ambience, driven by platform curation. What distinguishes synthetic ambience from its earlier concept is the dual processes of fabrication and compression. AI-created bots and automated accounts flood information streams with fake social proof and emotional signals that shape perception. AI-produced summaries and chatbot responses shorten the diverse, multi-source signals that formed ambient journalism into a single, pre-processed synthesis, bypassing traditional human sense-making. Fabrication pollutes the system’s inputs, the signals, while compression interferes with the outputs, the cognitive processes citizens use to piece together meaning from fragments. Together, they reshape an information landscape that maintains the constant, all-pervasive nature of ambient journalism while removing its epistemic core. As a concept, synthetic ambience lies at the crossroads of journalism studies, platform studies, AI ethics, and the epistemology of information. It addresses growing concerns about how generative AI not only transforms content creation but also the very infrastructure of public knowledge, effectively creating ambient layers through which publics develop impressions of the world. The fabrication mechanism is already here. While bots have always been present on Twitter (Carlon et al.), advances in generative AI suggest that platforms like X can expect to be flooded by AI bots that are nearly indistinguishable from real accounts (Yang and Menczer 20). Where earlier forms of astroturfing and coordinated inauthentic behaviour were labour-intensive and easier to detect, generative AI now enables the mass creation of synthetic voices that imitate the tone, cadence, and emotional range of genuine users in ways that are procedurally indistinguishable from organic activity. AI bots on X and other platforms turn ambient journalism into synthetic ambience by polluting streams with a large volume of posts. Emotional triggers and synthetic social proof can create the illusion of consensus or outrage on a much larger scale than previous attempts to influence public opinion. Synthetic ambience risks overshadowing verified reporting through intentional news pollution, diverting attention and mimicking emotion at scale. The result is a reduction in viewpoint diversity and erosion of trust, benefiting those with the resources to use AI extensively for these purposes. The compression mechanism operates through a different but complementary logic. Since Google introduced AI-generated summaries in 2025, such rundowns have become one of the most common ways to interact with generative AI (Simon 57). The immediacy, convenience, and perceived veracity of the summaries are most appealing to audiences (36). Algorithmic compression, through AI-generated summaries or responses from AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity, collapses the diverse, multi-source signals that make up ambient journalism into a single, synthesised answer, shaped by the AI model’s weighting. Audiences receive a ready-made interpretation influenced by a model, rather than encountering multiple voices and gradually forming their own understanding. Algorithmic compression both models and usurps human editorial authority. AI summaries and chatbot answers offer a pre-assembled model, effectively ending the ambient journalism cycle by taking over the cognitive labour of synthesis and producing a processed sense of events. The risk is not just homogenisation but also epistemic displacement, where publics never experience the diversity of reporting, sourcing, and perspectives that once defined the ambient news environment. This makes it harder to spot gaps, contradictions, or contested claims within the information landscape. Future research could explore whether there is now an epistemological shift toward synthetic ambience. Conceptually, future work should examine whether synthetic ambience operates differently across platforms and cultural contexts, and whether its dual mechanisms of fabrication and compression produce distinct or compounding effects on public knowledge formation. As ambient journalism continues to outgrow the platform that nurtured it, there remains a need to understand how people learn and interpret news within systems shaped by networks, algorithms, and generative AI. The rise of AI-powered synthetic ambience points to an information environment that is persistent, pervasive, and increasingly processed by machine models rather than human minds. 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“We Never Have to Say Goodbye”, promises You, Only Virtual, a commercial platform whose service claims to reconstruct a person from their digital data and make them available for interaction after death. You, Only Virtual is one of a growing number of commercial services—alongside Almaya, Here after AI, or Seance AI—that have come to be grouped under the informal designation of “deathbots”. Deathbots are AI-mediated interactive simulations of the dead, constructed from aggregated personal data (Bao and Zeng), and oriented toward what their proponents frequently describe as digital immortality, a term that carries considerable cultural and philosophical weight. As Stephen Cave has argued, the desire to persist beyond biological death organises some of the most enduring narratives in human culture, from the resurrection myths of antiquity to the soul theories of the Enlightenment. Deathbots are the latest iteration within this long history of the symbolic immortality of memory, legacy, or creative work that are the dominant modes through which humans have historically managed the fact of death (Lifton). But they also promise something ontologically different. Deathbots are framed as allowing the self to continue after death as an interactive digital presence. It is precisely this claim that this article sets out to examine, mobilising deathbots as a critical case study through which to interrogate what kind of immortality digital systems can produce and with what consequences for how we understand the persistence of the self after death. We do not argue simply that deathbots fail to deliver on their promise, as something clearly does persist in these encounters, data do outlive the person, and users do experience something that warrants serious critical attention. We argue, rather, that digital immortality can be understood in this context as the dispersal of the self into fragile and platform-dependent traces, where our data persist at massive scale (Öhman and Floridi; Öhman and Watson; Öhman), while the continuity of any individual person remains partial, fragile, and unevenly distributed. Deathbots vary considerably in their technical architecture and commercial form, from services that generate text-based conversational agents trained on messaging archives and social media data to more sophisticated multimodal systems that incorporate voice, image, and video to produce interactive avatars (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, "Synthetic Afterlives"). What they share is a dependency on data captured during the lifetime of the person they simulate, which is aggregated and used to train models capable of generating responses that approximate the communicative patterns of the deceased. Increasingly, this data capture is not only post-mortem but anticipatory as some platforms actively encourage users to contribute data before death. This enables a degree of curation and editorial control through which the future dead person can, in effect, shape and edit the version of themselves that others will encounter after they are gone (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, "Synthetic Afterlives"). Such pre-mortem construction introduces a layer of intentionality and agency that distinguishes some deathbot practices from the passive accumulation of digital traces, though it does not resolve and, in some respects, deepens the questions this article addresses, particularly the nature of the digital self. Moreover, the infrastructural conditions underlying deathbots are marked by a structural asymmetry that complicates any straightforward account of digital immortality. Platforms accumulate these fragments of the dead in quantities that will, on current trajectories, come to dwarf those of the living (Öhman and Watson). However, while data traces persist at scale (Öhman), the continuity of any given individual, we argue, remains fragmentary and precarious, not least of all because they are dependent on ongoing technical and economic support that is neither guaranteed nor permanent (Knees; Öhman). The benefits of this data persistence are also not democratically distributed, as the labour and costs fall on the dead (and their living relatives), while most of the benefits (at the very least, financial) accrue to the platforms that hold and monetise digital remains (Öhman and Floridi; Öhman). Scholarship on deathbots and adjacent digital afterlife phenomena has begun to emerge across questions of personhood and dignity (Stokes), continuing bonds and the emotional implications of these practices (Fabry and Alfano; Brescó de Luna and Jiménez-Alonso), the design and governance of AI afterlife platforms (Morris and Brubaker; Hollanek and Nowaczyk-Basińska; Kneese), and the mnemonic and affective dimensions of synthetic afterlives (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, "Synthetic Afterlives"; Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, AI Afterlives). This article builds on and advances this scholarship by offering a theoretically informed and empirically grounded analysis of a selection of deathbot platforms. Our arguments are based on findings from a series of platform walkthroughs and discourse analysis of publicly available documents from four companies: Almaya, HereAfter, Seance AI, and You, Only Virtual. We argue that the infrastructural fragility of deathbots unsettles the claims to digital immorality offered by these platforms, and that what sustains this presence are the unstable and negotiated forms of engagement in which the encounter with the digital object is emotionally resonant but remains ontologically uncertain. At the interface level, users encounter what we have elsewhere termed contested presence: an engagement that remains ambivalent and liminal, co-produced at the intersection of the system’s outputs and the user’s memory of the deceased (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, AI Afterlives). These encounters are ethically and philosophically unstable, not only because their meaning needs to be constantly negotiated, depending heavily on the emotional investment of users, but because they are shaped by inconsistent data traces and uneven platform infrastructure (Öhman, Kneese). In previous work, we have studied the affective and relational dimensions of deathbots (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, "Synthetic Afterlives"). In this article, we focus on the infrastructural conditions that underlie and constrain whatever form of immortality these systems try to deliver. In the remainder of this article, we (1) situate deathbots within the longer cultural history of immortality, identifying what is distinctive about these systems, particularly in relation to the forms of digital personhood they articulate; and (2) examine the infrastructural conditions and the asymmetries those conditions produce; before (3) concluding by reframing what deathbots reveal about the nature of digital immortality. The Immortality of the Digital Self: Between Legacy and Resurrection The desire to persist beyond biological death is among the most enduring preoccupations of human culture, and the forms through which that desire has been articulated have shifted considerably across time and context, even as the underlying impulse remains remarkably consistent (Lifton). Cave’s taxonomy of immortality narratives offers a productive framework for situating the deathbot within this history, identifying four broad modes—staying alive, resurrection, the soul, and legacy—each proposing a different account of what survives, in what form, and under what conditions. It is within the last of these that digital memorialisation has most commonly been situated; the photograph, the recorded voice, and the archived message are understood as extensions of a long history of material practices through which the dead are made to continue in the lives of those who remain (Recuber; Kasket). Deathbots, however, make a claim that exceeds legacy and moves toward something closer to Cave’s resurrection narrative, promising to animate traces rather than merely preserve them, and to sustain something that responds in real time rather than remaining available for others to interpret. They occupy, in this sense, an uneasy and largely unexamined position between legacy and resurrection. The modes of continuity through which humans have historically managed death anxiety are all, in different ways, predicated on the acceptance that what persists is a ‘symbolic immortality’ (Sherlock; Recuber), a representation or legacy, rather than the person themselves. Even Lifton’s fifth mode, experiential transcendence—the felt, immediate sense of continuity most commonly associated with spiritual experience—understands that continuity as exceptional, transient, and not routinisable. The deathbot’s claim aligns, however imperfectly, with the transhumanist tradition whose horizon includes mind uploading (Kurzweil), whole-brain emulation, and the singularity, and against which deathbots present themselves as an available approximation that requires only the accumulation of sufficient personal data. This alignment is both technical and ideological: the commercial and infrastructural conditions of digital immortality are presented as the natural and inevitable fulfilment of a universal human desire, obscuring the specific cultural formation, rooted partly in Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian imaginary, from which they emerge (Morozov). What underwrites these claims to some sort of immortality is a set of assumptions about the digital self. On the one hand, the ‘informational self’ (Floridi) is sufficiently coherent and stable to serve as the basis for reanimation; and on the other hand, its capture and reassembly by a technical system is equivalent, or near equivalent, to the continuation of a living person (at least their mind or soul). These assumptions sit uneasily alongside what work on the digital self has consistently demonstrated: that the digital self is never unified or coherent but always already distributed across platforms, contexts, and interactions, constituted through the systems and practices of mediation rather than simply expressed through them (Papacharissi; Turkle; van Dijck; Cheney-Lippold). The digital self is an ongoing process of assembly and reassembly, shaped by active choices like posting and deleting, where any sense of coherence is contingent and thus continuously changing. Generative AI systems attempting digital resurrection try to synthesise a unified subject out of posthumous data that were already fractured to begin with, as well as intertwined with other ‘communicative traces’ (Kneese) and data bodies (Kidd and Nieto McAvoy, "Deep Nostalgia"). It is here that analogue and digital legacy traditions diverge in ways that are consequential for the various understandings of immortality. The photograph, the letter, and the recorded voice have always been understood culturally as fragments, their partiality acknowledged and their status as representations of the person rather than the person themselves broadly accepted. The digital self, by contrast, has been culturally constructed as something closer to a continuous and interactive presence (Kneese), and it is precisely this cultural construction that deathbots operationalise, reanimating traces under the cover of an assumption about digital continuity that was always more ideological than real. What the deathbot attempts to reanimate was never, in other words, the kind of thing that reanimation in any meaningful sense could recover; a point toward which Stokes’s scepticism about digital continuation and Derrida’s account of the trace converge, though from distinct intellectual traditions and with different implications (Of Grammatology). The WhatsApp messages, email archives, and videos from which deathbots are trained are traces in the Derridean sense, remnants that bear the mark of a presence that is no longer there, but that never was either. These traces can neither fully persist nor can they fully disappear, haunting the systems that claim to sustain them (Derrida, Specters of Marx; Fisher). The Infrastructure of Digital Immortality The idea that deathbots can deliver a meaningful form of digital immortality rests, as the preceding section has argued, on assumptions about the coherence and recoverability of the digital self; but it rests equally on assumptions about the infrastructural conditions under which digital traces are held and made available that are no less consequential and considerably less examined. Infrastructure, as Starosielski has argued, is characteristically invisible until it breaks down; its conditions of operation are obscured by the very smoothness of its functioning. It is precisely this invisibility that allows deathbot platforms to present the persistence of data as natural and indefinite. The material conditions of that persistence are, however, marked by fragility and contingency as “platforms wither and die, just like people” (Kneese). They are marked as well by what Larkin has described as the simultaneous technical and poetic dimensions of infrastructural systems; the gap, that is, between what infrastructure promises and what it can sustain. Deathbot platforms depend on heterogeneous and distributed technical arrangements such as cloud storage, API architectures, machine learning pipelines, and platform-specific data governance regimes. None of these is stable or insulated from the economic and organisational pressures that govern all digital infrastructure (Starosielski). This infrastructural fragility has direct consequences for the claim to immortality. The survival of a deathbot is a commercial arrangement, dependent on subscription models, platform viability, and the continued willingness of companies to maintain services for which the user base is, by definition, unable to advocate (Öhman and Floridi). The history of digital platforms is substantially a history of discontinuation and data loss; services shut down, interfaces change, APIs are deprecated, and the data that underpinned them become inaccessible or are deleted entirely (Kneese). Techno-solutionism consistently fails in the context of platforms, and there is no structural reason why deathbot platforms should be exempt from these pressures (Kneese). What is marketed as immortality is, in infrastructural terms, a service agreement, and the conditions of that agreement are neither transparent nor permanent. Beyond the question of platform viability lies a deeper infrastructural problem concerning the nature of what data systems capture and how they recombine it. The traces from which deathbots are constructed—messages, voice recordings, social media posts, browsing histories—are not neutral or comprehensive records of a person but partial, context-dependent, and platform-shaped outputs of specific systems with specific logics of capture and retention (van Dijck; Cheney-Lippold). What any given platform retains is determined not by what is most representative of a person but by what its architecture is designed to capture, which means that the dataset from which a deathbot is trained is already shaped by commercial, technical, and algorithmic decisions that have nothing to do with the person whose immortality is at stake. The recombination of these traces through machine learning inference (and with the data traces of others) compounds rather than resolves this problem: what is produced is not a reconstruction of the person but a probabilistic model trained on their digital residue, generating outputs that are statistically plausible given the training data but that bear an unstable relationship to what the person would actually have said, thought, or done (Bender et al.). There is, moreover, a political dimension to this infrastructural analysis that the language of immortality tends to obscure. Digital remains, in a status analogous in important respects to physical remains (Öhman), are not symmetrically or democratically distributed. Whose data are retained, at what volume, and in what condition is shaped by inequalities of access, platform use, and governance that reproduce, in the afterlife of data, the inequalities of life (Öhman; Recuber). The scale at which platforms now hold the digital remains of the dead does not translate into equivalent conditions of individual continuity; on the contrary, it produces the structural asymmetry this article has identified as central to understanding what digital immortality actually means in practice. Whoever controls these archives, as Öhman argues, effectively controls future access to a collective digital past, and this power has consequences also for the broader politics of memory and historical record. Data persist massively and indifferently, while individuals persist partially and only for as long as the commercial and technical conditions that sustain their particular configuration remain in place. It is this asymmetry that the concept of digital immortality, as deployed in deathbot discourse, systematically fails to acknowledge, and it is here that the consent and agency dimensions of the argument become most pressing. In life, as previously argued, the assembly of the digital self involves the ongoing participation of the person; the posting, deleting, contextualising, and curating through which data are produced and managed. This participation, however partial and constrained by platform architectures, retains at least the possibility of correction or withdrawal. Death removes that possibility entirely, leaving the traces to be assembled and reassembled by systems and commercial actors whose interests are not those of the person whose data they hold (Kasket). The deathbot does not merely inherit a static archive; it operationalises that archive in ways the person could not have anticipated and did not consent to (Stokes), under conditions of infrastructure and inference that were not available at the time the data were produced, and in a context of commercial reanimation that transforms the meaning and function of data that were often generated for entirely different purposes. The reframing of death as a technical problem amenable to data-driven solutions, which underwrites the entire deathbot enterprise, demands critical scrutiny precisely because it naturalises these commercial and infrastructural arrangements as care rather than extraction (Kneese). The Limits of Digital Immortality What deathbots reveal, when examined through the ontological and infrastructural conditions this article has traced, is not the achievement of immortality but its persistent and structurally necessary deferral. The immortality they claim is real as a cultural formation and as a commercial proposition draws on deep and enduring human desires and aligns itself with an ideological tradition. It produces, at the interface level, encounters that are genuinely felt and emotionally significant, but it is underwritten by conditions that ensure it cannot be delivered in any of the senses that the concept has historically carried. Deathbots promise a form of resurrection but deliver something closer to legacy (Cave), and even that legacy is partial, commercially contingent, and shaped by the logics of systems that were never designed with the integrity of the person in mind. The distance between what is claimed and what is delivered is not incidental to deathbot culture but constitutive of it, and it is not a distance that better technology or more comprehensive data capture will meaningfully close. The unified, recoverable self that the idea of immortality presupposes never existed in any robust sense, digitally or otherwise, and the question of whether deathbots can deliver it is, in this respect, secondary to the more fundamental recognition that what they are attempting to deliver was never available to be delivered in the first place. Rather than the person, or even a coherent representation of the person, what survives death in these systems is a dispersed set of digital remains that are partial, platform-shaped, and subject to the same forces of obsolescence and discontinuation that govern all digital cultural forms (Kneese; Öhman). The self that deathbots wish to reanimate was never, as this article has argued, the kind of unified and recoverable thing that reanimation in any meaningful sense requires; it is assembled and reassembled through ongoing processes of interaction that death forecloses. To reframe deathbots as a critical case study in digital persistence rather than a technology of immortality is not to dismiss the genuine and complex experiences of those who use them. 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Conceptualising Immortality The meaning and pursuit of immortality has long occupied a central place in philosophical, religious, and cultural discourse (Buben; Kar; Rosenthal; Nairn). At its core, immortality refers to the continuation of existence beyond the limits of material death, often understood as the endurance of an intangible identity such as the soul, consciousness, or personal essence (Andrade). In contemporary digital culture, this enduring pursuit has taken on new significance through digital immortality, where technologies such as artificial intelligence, data preservation, and interactive avatars promise new ways of sustaining identity, presence, and memory beyond biological death. Accordingly, this article examines how audiences engage with digital immortality through responses to the documentary Artificial Immortality (2021), focussing on how viewers negotiate the concept through scepticism, spirituality, and lived experiences of grief and loss. In doing so, it situates digital immortality within longer histories of human attempts to transcend mortality while also considering how emerging technologies reconfigure the meanings of life, death, and continued existence. Bauman describes immortality as the “potential for life expansion” (6), capturing the human desire to move beyond the finiteness of mortal life. Across theological and cultural contexts, this yearning for ongoing existence has been expressed in different ways. Many religious traditions, for example, offer visions of an afterlife in which the self continues beyond death, whether through eternal reward or punishment, cycles of rebirth, or forms of spiritual liberation (Nwankwor; Shushan). These beliefs not only provide explanations for what may happen after death but also shape moral systems, where earthly behaviour is guided by the promise of lasting significance (Chin Park and Pyszczynski; de Cruz and de Smedt; Kar). At the same time, philosophical and psychological perspectives suggest that immortality is not only literal but can also be symbolic. In this sense, individuals seek continuity through legacy, memory, cultural contribution, and the passing on of values (Dechesne et al.). The Terror Management Theory (TMT), first conceptualised by Greenberg et al., helps explain this process by arguing that awareness of one’s mortality creates existential anxiety, which individuals manage by investing in beliefs and practices that offer either continued existence or lasting meaning beyond death. From this perspective, striving for immortality, whether literal or symbolic, serves as a way of coping with the anxiety surrounding the inevitability of material death (Darrell and Pyszczynski; Dechesne et al.; Fa). As Bauman suggests, much of human behaviour can be seen as a form of “defiance and denial of death” (7), where individuals attempt to create meaning, stability, and continuity despite life’s limitations. More recent scholarship extends this idea, showing that both religious beliefs and secular practices, including emerging technological engagements with death, are shaped by this ongoing desire to extend the self beyond its biological endpoint (de Cruz and de Smedt; Savin-Baden and Mason-Robbie). These perspectives present immortality not as a fixed concept, but as a complex and evolving one. Digital Immortality: Evolving Perspectives on Death in the Age of Technology The concept of digital immortality can be understood as a contemporary extension of symbolic immortality, where technology enables new and emerging forms of continued existence beyond biological death (Basett; Huberman). Advances in ‘death tech’ or thanatechnologies (e.g. those concerned with death, grief, immortality, and the afterlife) have accelerated alongside developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and are reshaping how mortality (and consequently immortality) is experienced and understood (Özdemir et al.; Puzio). A prominent example is two-way digital immortality, which allows the living to interact with digital avatars of the deceased (Kawashima et al.). These avatars, often described as “mind twins”, are created from personal data such as text, images, video, and audio, enabling simulations that resemble the deceased and allow ongoing interaction for the bereaved. Such technologies are increasingly visible in commercial contexts, with platforms like MyHeritage, HereAfter AI, Eternime, and Storyfile developing digital afterlife services (Puzio). Their primary aim is to provide emotional support and assist with grief by maintaining a sense of continued presence (Syarova et al.). However, these developments raise significant moral, theological, and philosophical concerns, particularly around the potential erosion of human uniqueness and established understandings of death (di Ceglie). A growing body of literature highlights the paradoxical risks of these technologies. While intended to ease grief, digital immortality may produce an ‘immortality trap’, where prolonged interaction extends grief, fosters dependency, and increases vulnerability to manipulation (Fa; Harbinja et al.; Özdemir et al.). It may also encourage attachment to “idealized or distorted versions of the deceased” (Fa 6), reshaping memory and emotional experience. These concerns are compounded by ethical and legal challenges, including issues of data ownership, consent, posthumous personhood, and potential misuse for harmful purposes such as exploitation or defamation (Balaji et al.; Marinotti and Lubin; Mason-Robbie and Savin-Baden; Nowaczyk-Basińska and Kiel). The commodification of digital immortality further raises concerns about privileged access and inequality. As these services are often costly, they may be more accessible to those with greater financial resources, reinforcing existing socio-economic disparities (Bhargava; Hurtado Hurtado). These issues highlight the need to examine digital immortality through an interdisciplinary lens that considers technological, ethical, philosophical, psychological, and cultural dimensions, as well as public discourse (Bhargava; Nowaczyk-Basińska and Kiel). Public engagement with digital immortality is largely shaped by its portrayal in speculative popular culture and science fiction, which reflect broader societal concerns about life, death, and technological transcendence (Bhargava; Nairn and Matthews). As a result, it is widely understood as a complex and contested concept (Biano). Although empirical research remains limited, existing studies suggest that attitudes toward digital immortality are closely linked to beliefs about death, religion, morality, and authenticity (Nairn and Matthews). Some individuals resist these thanatechnologies to avoid burdening loved ones with continued emotional ties, while others emphasise the sacred nature of traditional death practices over simulated interactions (Kawashima et al.; Privezentseva et al.). There is also widespread scepticism about the current limits of technology, particularly its inability to authentically reconstruct personality (Torres). These complexities are reflected in behavioural research, which identifies emotional needs, perceived risks, and individual values as key factors shaping engagement (Tu et al.). As Nairn and Matthews suggest, contemporary understandings of immortality are increasingly shaped by an interplay between technological imaginaries and enduring moral and spiritual frameworks. This tension is evident in public discourse, where digital immortality is both embraced as innovation and questioned as an ethical problem. Public responses reflect this tension. While there is curiosity about AI’s potential to preserve identity, acceptance remains cautious and often sceptical (Tu et al.; Yin et al.). Concerns about authenticity, control, and emotional impact frequently outweigh perceived benefits, and attitudes are shaped by cultural, religious, and personal experiences of loss. Overall, digital immortality emerges as a contested phenomenon that reflects both enduring desires to transcend mortality and contemporary efforts to reconfigure life and death. Yet, while existing scholarship has mapped many of the ethical, philosophical, and technological implications of digital immortality, less attention has been paid to how audiences themselves interpret these possibilities when encountering them through documentary media. Examining responses to Artificial Immortality (2021), therefore, offers a way to understand how public engagement with digital immortality is shaped not only by technological promise or ethical concern, but also by scepticism, spirituality, grief, and lived experiences of loss. Method This study adopted a qualitative, exploratory approach to examine how YouTube commenters engage with the concept of digital immortality as presented in the documentary Artificial Immortality (2021), directed by Ann Shin. The film explores emerging technological efforts to extend human existence beyond biological death through artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotechnology, raising questions about whether the human mind, identity, and consciousness can be replicated. Featuring perspectives from prominent thinkers such as Nick Bostrom, Hiroshi Ishiguro, Ben Goertzel, and Deepak Chopra, the documentary situates digital immortality within broader debates about post-biological life, human–machine integration, and the possibility of AI-generated “mind twins”. Its selection for international film festivals, including DocEdge (2021), the Calgary International Film Festival (2021), and the Spirit Film Festival (2021), further reflects its cultural and scholarly relevance to contemporary discussions of emerging technologies (A.rtificial i.mmortality). YouTube was selected as a site of analysis due to its role as a participatory platform where audiences publicly negotiate and respond to emerging ideas. Two versions of the documentary were identified on YouTube. The first video contained 583 comments, while the second contained 683 comments. Comments from both videos were extracted using data-scraping software and subsequently cleaned. This process involved removing spam, duplicate entries, and comments written in languages other than English. The final dataset comprised 1,012 comments, which formed the corpus for analysis. The study employed Braun and Clarke’s (‶Conceptual“) reflexive thematic analysis. This approach was selected for its capacity to capture both semantic meanings (explicit content) and latent meanings (underlying assumptions and interpretations) within the data, aligning with an interpretive analytical perspective. The analysis followed the six phases outlined by Braun and Clarke (‶Using“). First, the data were familiarised through repeated reading of the comments. Second, initial codes were generated independently by the researchers before being compared and discussed collaboratively. This iterative process allowed for the refinement and consolidation of codes. Through following these steps, an initial set of eight themes was identified. These were subsequently reviewed, refined, and collapsed into five overarching themes that best captured the patterns within the dataset. Three of our final themes are discussed here, including: (1) scepticism toward digital immortality, (2) religious or spiritual interpretations of immortality, and (3) personal experiences with loss. Themes omitted from this article included social and ethical concerns about AI futures and existential reflections on mortality. Theme 1: Scepticism toward Digital Immortality The first and most prominent theme, with 417 comments, scepticism toward digital immortality, captures a widespread reluctance to accept that AI-driven systems can meaningfully preserve human consciousness or identity. Comments within this theme consistently frame digital immortality, particularly in the form of AI-generated digital avatars or mind-uploading imaginaries, as producing, at best, a simulation or replica rather than a continuation of the self. Statements such as “I die, but a digital copy lives on. It isn’t me”, “a copy of you isn’t you”, and “even if you could capture the full data set of a person, that person would still die with their body” emphasise a perceived distinction between data, personality, mimicry, and authentic personhood. From this perspective, AI-generated digital avatars are not extensions of the self but imitations that lack the essential qualities that constitute being. Such scepticism aligns with existing scholarship that characterises these technologies as forms of “weak” artificial immortality (Puzio). Although AI systems may replicate behavioural patterns or reconstruct aspects of personality from data, they do not possess consciousness or subjective experience (Iglesias, et al.; Stokes). Consequently, they function as simulations rather than continuations of life. Ulatowski’s analogy illustrates the point, describing digital avatars as akin to playback devices. Much like a television displaying a recorded film, these systems can reproduce expressions or memories without actually experiencing them. The appearance of personhood is therefore generated through computational processes that resemble what Iglesias et al. describe as “philosophical zombies” (98). The digitally generated avatar may exhibit human-like behaviour, reminiscing on stored data, but there is ultimately ‘nobody home’. When commenters suggest that “it will only build a predictor based on all of our data”, they further emphasise that AI-generated representations of the deceased rely on archived data to produce responses (Iglesias, et al.). Such systems create the impression of interaction while lacking the capacity for genuine growth, spontaneity, or relational depth. Scholars similarly argue that these entities are better understood as facsimiles or substitutes that simulate communication rather than sustain it (Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna). The distinction becomes particularly significant in the context of human relationships, where attachment is directed toward a specific, irreplaceable individual rather than a set of reproducible traits (Brinkmann). Under such conditions, the idea that loss could be mitigated through replication appears fundamentally flawed, as a copy cannot stand in for the singularity of the original person (Mercer and Trothen). Alongside these philosophical concerns, commenters express scepticism grounded in the biological and scientific limits of current AI technologies. Assertions that “we don’t even understand consciousness yet”, “the brain is too complex to replicate”, and “AI can mimic behaviour but not consciousness” reflect a broader awareness of gaps in contemporary knowledge. Scholarship reinforces this position by emphasising that human consciousness cannot be separated from the systems that produce it (Mercer and Trothen). The brain operates in constant interaction with the body through neural, chemical, and hormonal processes. Emotional states, cognition, and perception emerge not only from neural activity but also from interactions with the wider organism, including the gut, endocrine system, and sensory feedback (Mercer and Trothen). Scepticism toward digital immortality reflects more than a rejection of AI; it signals deeper uncertainty about the nature of consciousness and the limits of computational representation. Commenters implicitly recognise what scholarship makes explicit: current AI-driven frameworks remain ill-equipped to reproduce the complexity, continuity, and embodied nature of human experience. Digital immortality, as a result, is understood not as a viable extension of life but as a reductionist approximation that falls short of preserving the self in any meaningful sense. Theme 2: Religious or Spiritual Interpretations of Immortality The second theme, religious or spiritual interpretations of immortality, captures a cluster of 233 responses that frame immortality as belonging to a divine or metaphysical domain rather than an AI-driven technological one. Comments such as “you can’t upload the soul”, “only Jesus can give eternal life”, “humans cannot play God”, and “the soul transcends data” position AI-mediated digital immortality, particularly through AI-generated digital avatars, as fundamentally incompatible with long-standing spiritual understandings of human existence. Rather than rejecting immortality outright, these responses reassert its legitimacy within religious frameworks, suggesting that eternal life is not a technical problem to be solved, but a spiritual condition governed by divine authority (Nairn and Matthews). A point worth noting is that the religious frameworks tended to skew towards Western or Abrahamic conceptions of the afterlife and, therefore, alternative religious perspectives were missing in such elucidations on digital immortality. The rejection of AI-driven digital immortality on religious grounds is not unexpected. Although secularisation has displaced organised religion from many institutional centres of power (Ferngren; Nairn), religion continues to exert cultural and moral influence, particularly in shaping beliefs about death and the afterlife (Bhargava; Nairn and Matthews). Scholarship has long demonstrated that religious systems function as frameworks for moral judgement and social regulation, often grounded in the notion of moralising gods who monitor behaviour and reward or punish accordingly (Johnstone; Willard et al.). Comments such as “only Jesus can give eternal life” or “real eternal life is through Christ” align closely with this body of work, reinforcing the idea that immortality is contingent upon adherence to divine structures rather than human innovation. Religious discourse, therefore, operates as a boundary-setting mechanism, policing the limits of what is considered legitimate or attainable in relation to life, death, and what lies beyond. At the same time, these responses draw upon deeply embedded dualistic understandings of the self. Assertions that “your spirit leaves the body when you die” or that “the soul cannot be captured by the machine” reflect a long-standing body–soul dualism in which the essence of personhood is conceived as immaterial, invisible, and fundamentally distinct from the physical body (Heflick et al.). Scholars have noted that such dualistic thinking emerges early in cognitive development and persists across cultures, often underpinning religious conceptions of the afterlife (Harris; Malcolm). Within such a framework, the body is understood as a temporary vessel, or even a form of confinement, for an immortal soul that exists independently of biological processes (Hacker; O’Neill). AI-mediated digital immortality, by contrast, is typically premised on a materialist logic that reduces consciousness to information, a form of data that can be extracted, replicated, and sustained within computational systems (Hurtado; Magerstädt). The tension between these ontologies is central to the resistance articulated in this theme. If the soul is non-material and transcendent, then it cannot be digitised, simulated, or reproduced through artificial intelligence without losing its essential nature. As several comments suggest, AI-generated avatars may replicate aspects of memory, personality, or cognition, but they fail to capture what is perceived to be the true essence of the self—the soul. From this perspective, digital immortality is not simply impossible; it is conceptually misguided, mistaking the brain for the soul and simulation for transcendence. Religious and spiritual frameworks, therefore, provide a powerful interpretive lens through which AI technologies are evaluated and, in many cases, resisted by online contributors. By situating immortality within divine authority and grounding personhood in an immaterial soul, commenters challenge the legitimacy of AI-driven digital immortality at both moral and ontological levels. In doing so, they reaffirm the enduring influence of religious thought in shaping contemporary debates about technology, identity, and the limits of human intervention in life and death. Theme 3: Personal Experiences with Loss The third and final theme, personal experiences with loss, captures a more ambivalent and emotionally complex set of responses to digital immortality. Unlike the previous themes, which were characterised by strong opposition, 84 comments within this theme reveal a divided perspective on whether AI-mediated digital immortality, particularly through AI-generated digital avatars and conversational replicas, might support or hinder the grieving process. Responses such as “living forever without him would be worse than death”, “would I want a digital version of my loved ones?”, “my parents are still in my head”, and “I wish I could ask my grandfather questions today” reflect deeply personal engagements with bereavement, memory, and the enduring presence of the deceased. Other responses, including “watching someone fade away is devastating”, foreground the emotional trauma associated with loss, positioning AI-driven digital immortality as a potential, yet uncertain, means of coping. These reflections align closely with established scholarship on grief, particularly frameworks that conceptualise bereavement as a dynamic and ongoing process (Manzella). The dual process model suggests that individuals oscillate between a loss orientation, characterised by emotional pain, longing, and remembrance, and a restoration orientation, which involves adapting to life without the deceased and re-engaging with everyday responsibilities (Stroebe and Schut; Xie). Within such a framework, AI-mediated digital immortality presents a paradox. On one hand, AI-generated digital avatars may support loss-oriented coping by enabling continued connection, offering a sense of presence, and facilitating remembrance. On the other hand, such systems may disrupt restoration-oriented processes by inhibiting the psychological adjustment required to accept absence and move forward. Broader debates within grief studies further illuminate this tension. Earlier psychoanalytic approaches, such as Freud’s, emphasised the need to sever emotional bonds with the deceased in order to achieve closure (Hall; Manzella; Worden). More contemporary perspectives argue that while death ends a life, it does not end a relationship. Ongoing connections are maintained through what are often termed ‘continuing bonds’ (Klass), sustained by memories, stories, and symbolic objects (Florczak and Lockie; Hall). Comments such as “family memories are enough”, “your legacy lives through stories”, and “make videos for your children instead of avatars” resonate with this perspective, suggesting that non-interactive forms of remembrance may provide a healthier means of preserving connection without impeding emotional adjustment. Within this context, AI-mediated digital immortality can be understood as both an extension and a potential distortion of continuing bonds. While AI systems offer the possibility of interaction and simulated presence, they may also prevent what some scholars describe as the emotional relocation of the deceased, a process necessary for adapting to loss (Worden). Continued engagement with highly lifelike digital avatars risks blurring the boundary between presence and absence, potentially complicating or prolonging grief in ways that may become psychologically “maladaptive” (Florczak and Lockie 282). The ambivalence expressed in these comments also finds resonance in public discourse. Reactions such as those from Robin Williams’s daughter Zelda Williams, who has spoken against the use of AI to recreate her father, finding it “personally disturbing”, highlight the potential for such technologies to be experienced as unsettling or distressing rather than comforting. As she states, to watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough', just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening … . You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross. (Saunders and Busby paras 10-11) Williams’s view underscores the broader point that while digital immortality may appeal as a means of sustaining connection, its emotional consequences are far from straightforward. Overall, personal experiences of loss shape nuanced and often conflicting attitudes toward AI-driven digital immortality. Some individuals are drawn to the possibility of maintaining interaction with deceased loved ones, while others recognise that such practices may interfere with processes of grief, adaptation, and personal growth. The comments, therefore, point to a careful negotiation between the desire to hold on and the need to let go, highlighting the limits of AI-mediated technological intervention in fundamentally human experiences of loss and mourning. Conclusion In conclusion, digital immortality reveals how enduring human desires to transcend death are being reimagined through contemporary technologies. Our analysis shows that public responses to these developments are shaped not only by curiosity, but also by deep scepticism, spiritual beliefs, and personal experiences of grief. Across the comments, digital immortality was rarely understood as a true continuation of the self. Instead, it was more often framed as simulation, imitation, or an ethically troubling attempt to reproduce what many believe is irreducibly human. Crucially, these technologies remain limited. There is still no scientific understanding of how consciousness emerges, nor any viable method for transferring it into digital form. Digital avatars, therefore, function not as continuations of the self, but as data-driven simulations. While they may appear to offer continuity beyond death, they also introduce new emotional, philosophical, and ethical tensions, particularly around authenticity, grief, memory, and the boundaries of personhood. Ultimately, digital immortality is best understood not as the defeat of death, but as a cultural and technological response to mortality anxiety. It reflects both the persistence of humanity’s desire for continuity and the limits of technology in addressing the existential, spiritual, and relational realities of death. 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