Immersion and expanded spectatorships: notes on a reinvented field

The special section “Immersion and expanded spectatorships” discusses how moving images have been intensely reinvented in recent virtual environments, promoting renewed forms of viewing that change and broaden the spectator’s experience. Engaging with the fact that the history of immersive media is often difficult to reconstruct and categorize clearly, the four essays here gathered reflect precisely such plurality of research lines. Simultaneously, they further demonstrate how this field has for long been shaped — and continues to be so — in a hybrid manner, through fruitful dialogues and mutual contamination.