Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interactive platforms have fundamentally reshaped how users engage with moving images, not only transforming narrative possibilities but also reconfiguring the epistemic status of the image itself. More than a narrative device or a set of technological affordances, interactivity operates as a vector for the reconstruction of the real—what can be known, how it is felt, and who participates in its becoming. The growing prominence of interactive works that engage with real-world conditions, rather than fictional or speculative realms, signals a significant shift: interactivity is increasingly used not to escape from the real but to recompose it. This raises a pressing question: why does interactivity appear better suited to engage with reality than to invent imaginary worlds? This article situates interactivity not merely as a mode of storytelling, but as a philosophical and political gesture—a means of reworlding the real. In doing so, it reclaims interactivity as a critical method of research-creation, one that prioritizes process over product, relation over representation, and sensation over simulation. Through a close engagement with Couchot’s theories and a broader analysis of affect, agency, and embodied cognition, the text explores how interactive practices challenge dominant regimes of knowing, opening new territories for speculative, sensory, and situated modes of engagement. The arguments developed in this article are grounded in the analysis of thirty-three research-creation projects presented at the Interactive Film and Media (#IFM) conferences between 2021 and 2025. These projects span a wide range of media forms—including web-based platforms (EXPOSED, Receipts), immersive VR environments (Affiorare, Firgrove Reimagined), augmented reality and geolocated works (AR Cité, Monument Public Address System AR), experimental games (Scapegoat), hybrid installations (The Circle Project, Somos Mulheres), and poetic or glitch aesthetics (Lucid Assemblage, The New Virtuality). They address urgent themes such as incarceration and justice, gender and queer identity, mourning and grief, ecological degradation, Indigenous epistemologies, and ritualized embodiment. Rather than focusing on singular case studies, the article maps broader patterns across the corpus to determine emergent tendencies in how interactivity is mobilized in contemporary creative practice. Particular attention is paid to how specific mediums structure user engagement, what forms of knowing and sensing they privilege, and how they contribute to rethinking agency, authorship, and the construction of the real. By surveying this constellation of projects, the article aims to elucidate how research-creation today positions media not merely as vessels of representation, but as engines of speculative, participatory world-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".