The main focus of the articles published by Franco Cassano since the second half of the 90s in many national newspapers (and later collected in Modernizzare stanca) is the mythology of progress, the idea of an unlimited productivity, the domination of speed and technology in every human sphere, social competition and individualism as a kind of civil religion. These themes seem to be linked to the critique of capitalism made by the late Pasolini, with particular reference to the category of “development without progress”...

In the scholarly literature on film music, hyperdiegetic sounds are those that draw attention to themselves and have a symbolic effect, assigning a particular meaning to objects, characters, actions. Starting from this connotation, I would like to propose the idea of hyperdiegetic song or nursery rhyme, analyzing some peculiar works by Ennio Morricone featuring lyrics have clear references to the film’s plot, recounting events that have taken place before or will take place after such music is played. In the films discussed in this paper, hyperdiegetic songs are used as scores or as source music...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently gained great progress in many disciplines, from natural language processing to visual recognition. In all these vast possibilities for computation, however, it seems that AI struggles at reproducing one of the most common human forms of expression: “memes”. Memes happen to be too complex as digital artifacts and too deep in being an expressive part of cultural, personal, or collective experiences for any AI to understand–despite its wide access to data...

Through the summative recapture of the calls that Wim Wenders has been dedicating and addressing to Europe for over thirty years, my essay aims to explore the paradigm according to which, in Wenders’ words, the audiovisual culture awareness can still shape, nurture and forge a sense of unity and integration in the longed-for United States of Europe’s aesthetical and political complex perception...

Unframing/Reframing the Media Experience © 2025 by Piermarco Aroldi, Barbara Scifo, Adriano D'Aloia is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Originally tied to cinematic experience, immersion is frequently associated in media discourse with Virtual Reality (VR) and often regarded as a media-property. For instance, ‘fully immersive VR’ refers to a setup enabling a unique form of image appreciation: the digital image displayed through a headset respond to user’s movements, simulating an environment filled with perceptual affordances. Thus, it has been claimed that VR displays a peculiar kind of image that attempts to negate its iconic nature, by rejecting the traditional frame of pictorial representation...

One of the most relevant and disruptive aspects of the environments organized by immersive media consists of multisensoriality. It is not a case that the device historically recognized as the first virtual reality system, Morton Heilig’s Sensorama, was explicitly designed to achieve the agreement of different senses (vision, sound, smell, balance, touch) more than the immersion in a virtual space...

The premiere of ABBA Voyage marked a milestone in the experience industry. In a purpose-built arena in London, the Swedish popular music group ABBA performed as holographic representations (ABBAtars) in their first concert in 40 years. This event combined hologram technology, animations, film sequences, live music, and pre-recorded vocals to create an immersive experience...