Getting in, Running Out. Some Reflections on Immersion and Emersivity

In this paper, we want to discuss the concept of emersivity as intelligible in the context of mediated audiovisual experiences. Usually, scholars focus their efforts in investigating the ways people get involved into media use: the very notion of ‘immersivity’ captures this kind of involvement and relies on a spatial understanding of mediated presence. Once ‘you are there’, this conceptual metaphor alludes, your enaction has geared towards a distal environment, leaving your attention to the local one in a second place. Indeed, this is only one side of the coin. Instead of transporting the user in a distal world, and make it believe, or even sense, of being elsewhere, another media tradition strives in keeping the user in its very place by ‘augmenting’ its surrounding environment with new affordances and enactive paths. So, if immersion highlights the way we leave our natural world to ‘dive into’ a virtual one, emersivity acknowledges the physical world rather than eliding it and occurs when the natural environment becomes richer in opportunities through the use of mediators of some kind. Through a comparison between media archaeology, embodied and enactive theories of cognition, and the pharmacological approach proposed by Stiegler, we explore the emersive opportunities provided by a haptic technology called Sentero.