Embodiment

‘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.