Exploring the Media Multiverse in 2084

What will be the shape of the mediascape in the future? The current narratives of its development envision towards a unified "metaverse" [11] that would provide a hegemonic virtual universe as a continuous and interconnected multi-user environment fully integrated with (or even replacing) physical reality [25]. Yet, emerging work has begun to foreground plurality in how immersive realities are and can be imagined [17].

Building on this recent work, we propose the concept of media multiverse as a way of re-imagining the future mediascape. In a media multiverse, we construct our understanding of the world and communicate with each other through various mediatic technologies and practices whose multifarious forms affect how and what we understand and communicate. Virtual engagement is not monolithic but pluralistic, as also suggested by previous work [17], and this plurality may just as well spell hybridization or polarization, freedom or chaos, communal negotiation or social control.

With this framing, our first research aim is to critically explore the future of this proposed mediascape through elicitation and analysis of a curated set of speculative abstracts. To achieve this, we asked a multidisciplinary group of scholars to speculate about a world filtered through this kind of heterogeneous mediascape in the year 2084, a date recalling both the conflict between human and machine (as in the arcade game Robotron: 2084 [21]) and the use of communication systems for social control (as in Orwell's 1984 [28]). Scholars were invited to write fictional abstracts about studies conducted in 2084, and we have curated and analyzed these abstracts in this paper.

Our second research aim is a methodological one. In some previous fictional abstracts, they are gathered through an open call and presented as a curated collection [30]. In other cases, the abstracts are generated by the researchers themselves to embody their speculations [14] and included as a whole in the paper [35, 37]. Our paper contributes to and extends these approaches by bringing together both an abstract collection -which in itself offers a meaningful contribution by bringing together a variety of imaginations open to interpretation- and also our own analysis of such texts. The fictional abstracts, then, are used both as a way to open up fictional potentials on a certain topic, but also serving as vehicle for a more in-depth analysis of the socio-technical imaginary[22] through our analysis.

Our analysis, then, shows that media multiverse is indeed a kaleidoscopic media multiverse, governed by dynamics of translation, adaptation, and navigation of users and textualities across different realities, worlds, and universes; accompanied by other mediatic techno-social innovations related to Extended Realities, bio-tracking, adaptive algorithms, wearables, bodily technologies, and more; and viewed through new paradigms, from media convergence, posthuman, and post-digital approaches to critical emergent frameworks. Using the shared, specialized language of academic abstracts, we have brought together a diverse array of perspectives from language and media studies, social sciences, interaction design, human-computer interaction (HCI), and beyond to complement and challenge dominant technocentric narratives about the development of media technologies by presenting a compilation of conflicting and contrasting speculations about the future that nevertheless together cast a critical lens on the role of technology in our world.

Our contribution to HCI is two-fold. First, our work introduces the Media Multiverse as a conceptual base for examining future sociotechnical imaginaries. Second, the multidisciplinary nature of the collection and the result of our analysis of the abstracts suggest that collections of speculative abstracts could go beyond simple scoping or identification of trends to which they have been relegated so far. Beyond HCI, therefore, speculative abstract collection and analysis can become a data-collection strategy that allows to generate new knowledge about sociotechnical imaginaries, ideological narratives of future technology, and the counternarratives that can critique them.

In this collective paper, we used speculative fictional abstracts as a method to collect imaginaries of the future of the mediascape from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, semiotics, media studies, translation studies, and linguistics.

A1:

Author (Fictional): 001101 Δ -Mapping Unit (Human Instance) * S. ßurα çë–BrØnع

Partial human decipherment reachable via associated image (Fig. 1) [1].

A2: There's a Journal in My Head: Autoethnographic Self-Provocations on Radical Intramedial Communication

Author (Fictional): Ego Ipsum, Independent Researcher ²

For over three decades, humans have been confined to cocoon centers to maximize efficiency (Teknokratik Plex Decree 2048-77). The solitude of these phenomenological ecologies of one, dubbed "coffins" by bygone luddites, has been mitigated via mental linkages across cocoons. While most people routinely share their psyche with others, a growing minority choose to venture alone in their worlds and selves within, aided by meta-neural agents such as shoulderDaemon^σ and selfTranslation^≈. Although nicknamed "Mind Wankers" by neoluddites, in-communicators report higher wisdom (measured by standardized benchmark tests), happiness (Id.), and value (Id.). However, no scientific accounts detailing the inner experience of absolute independence exist. In this study, I report a year in which, having erased all memory of legacy social contact and overclocked my external irritation blockers, I aimed to cultivate purely intra-me-dial communication and achieve a perfect state of uni-multi-versal being, feeling, knowing, creating... Having committed to absolute isolation, I self-publish this article within a special issue of Chrysalis: Intracranial Journal of Me-dia Studies. I wrap up my contribution with a puzzle for my own amusement: If this is a human…

A3: Understanding The Phantom Snail: Haptic Negative Space mitigates Phantom Mucus Sensation in Long-Term Dermal Haptic Implant Use

Author: Donald Degraen, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Dermal Haptic Implants (DHIs) are ubiquitous for navigating the media multiverse. However, long-term users reported experiencing the ’phantom mucus’ effect, where tactile sensations described as snails traversing the skin are felt after leaving virtual worlds. We hypothesize that this phenomenon emerges from incongruent micro-stimulations during reality transitions, resulting in a reality bleed caused by persistent low-level mechanoreceptor activations. To evaluate our hypothesis, we recorded haptic activations and conducted post-experience questionnaires in a three-month observational study (N=20,000). Results indicate transitions between realities to be the primary cause of phantom sensations. In a one-year deployment study (N=2,084), we evaluated three interventions: intermittent sensory fasting, periodic haptic noise, and incongruent visuo-haptic stimuli. Results show that structured haptic negative space, i.e., intentional intervals of tactile inactivity, significantly reduced the frequency and intensity of phantom experiences. We discuss design implications for continuous haptic systems and argue for designed absence in long-term somatic interaction.

A4: Automated Real-Time Analyses of Language Change Across World Languages: Evaluation and Prospects

Author: Mark Kaunisto, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Since the linguistic turn of the 2030s—marked by the first continuously refreshed megacorpora and standardized intra-day shift analytics—the real-time monitoring of language change has become a routine component of linguistic research. What earlier generations quaintly described as “trend tracking” has matured into fine-grained detection of micro-innovations in the lexicon, spelling, morphosyntax, and discourses, observable simultaneously across regional, social, thematic, and register-governed dimensions. These analyses operate across the layers of physical, augmented, and virtual environments in which linguistic variants circulate at different speeds and follow different interactional norms. As different communicative spaces produce reality-specific trajectories of change (e.g., rapid fluctuation in immersive VR versus slower stabilization in mixed AR settings), combining the distinct analytic parameters of each layer has been key to the development of these practices. This study revisits two persistent methodological issues in modern linguistics. First, the problem of defining operational thresholds for identifying innovation, diffusion, stabilization, evolution, and obsolescence within continuously updating data streams. Second, the recursive impact of the now-institutionalized Pulse Reports on linguistic shifts, which since the late 2040s have repeatedly been shown to generate measurable counter-innovations, policy pushbacks, and backlash cycles. These dynamics highlight the paradox of observing changes that are altered by being reported.

A5: The Halo City: Managing Emotional Flows Through Aura-6

Authors: Aygün Varol, Asif Shaikh, Johanna Virkki, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Affect-inference pipelines have expanded into metropolitan-scale infrastructures, translating biosignals into mixed-reality chromatic halos. Since the 2078 deployment of Aura Lenses, these systems have become integral to managing high-density emotional flows across the city's media multiverse. These flows now migrate from transit corridors into domestic dashboards, workplace compliance interfaces, and entertainment streams, where halos are re-encoded as safety signals, professionalism scores, or engagement metrics. To address drift propagation, instability under peak loads, and vulnerability to deliberate masking observed in Aura-5, we introduce Aura-6, a redesigned architecture integrating expanded sensor-fusion pathways, adaptive preprocessing, and region-level affect-coherence modeling. In our study, we analyse 3.2 million aura-transition events across three transit corridors shows a 42% reduction in cross-corridor drift and sub-25 ms synchronization under moderate load, while adaptive filters reduce disturbances from user-initiated obfuscation. This translation is not neutral, as domestic halos become vectors of intimate surveillance, which can systematically disadvantage neurodivergent and cross-cultural expression. These translations reinforce three emerging governance modes: etiquette-by-algorithm, which suppresses high-arousal chromatic spikes; credentialed calm, where institutions require pastel-baseline stability validated by region-level coherence metrics; and counter-aura practices, where activists exploit residual noise channels to resist deterministic profiling.

A6: Better Living Through Teleliving

Author (Fictional): Kate Saunders, The Look Club (TheLook.Club) ³

Since FDA approval of “teleliving” in 2064, UN member nations have seen a significant reduction in chronic loneliness, particularly among single-adult populations. With 1.8 billion daily users, what started as a participatory “sitcom” has become a literal way of life and a well-regarded medicinal practice. Patented by Exelauno LLC, teleliving enables viewer-participants to experience family, work, and social life, and a narrative, fictional entertainment world seamlessly through XR devices, with real-time biometric data adjusting the pacing and balance of experiences to optimize productivity, happiness, and health based on the viewer-participant's physiology. Consequently, the mass adoption of MR visor-glasses has provided an unexpected respite from a device-heavy media multiverse, amplifying the dopamine boost and parasocial relationships of sitcoms even beyond the 27% demonstrated by in-headset 360 content. Chi-square analysis of teleliving and migration data between 2067–2082 reveals a statistically significant correlation between teleliving and the rural sprawl of the ‘70s. Single adults now see friends and colleagues more frequently, with less stress and expense than in densely populated cities, and medical insurance companies report a decrease in hypertension, diabetes, and depression with regular teleliving practice. Building on these findings, this paper examines the medical, ethical, and geographical risks posed by copycat teleliving companies, especially those aiming to reduce operating costs by incorporating pharmaceutical supplements into the experience.

A7: Cognitive Drifting and Proxy Selves in Multiverse Marseille

Author (Fictional): Kira Gousefi (Humanoid Co-Inhabitant, Model HRU-7), Department of Mediated Cognition, Marseille ⁴

After France's Cognition Integration Act (2072), Marseille, Europe logistics hub where autonomous shipping, migrant networks, and hybrid governance converge, became a testbed for neural interfaces and city-scale AI mediation. By 2084, public space operates as a Media Multiverse where the same street appears through different AI-curated layers, creating identity uncertainty in everyday encounters. In markets, a “vendor” may be a robotic body whose controller shifts mid-sentence from a remote worker to an AI or a municipal agent. In autonomous taxis, the “driver” voice can switch without notice. When agency is invisible, trust erodes and cognitive privacy is threatened. Guided by Simondon's concept that individuation is a dynamic process through which technologies, beings, and ideas emerge, we treat identity as relationally produced, so urban interfaces shape who someone becomes in interaction. Using a Civic Convergence Protocol, a citizen-centered participatory method, we convened three city publics, offline citizens, neural citizens, and humanoid co-inhabitants to test neural mediation and agent handoffs. Breakdowns clustered when people decide whether to share attention, data, or payment. We propose Legibility Architecture, an urban interface principle: agency labels, audible handoff cues, neural consent gates, and unaugmented zones to restore shared ground.

A8: Caves of Otherness: A Trio-Ethnographic Study of Sensorily Altered Communities of Otherness Practice

Authors (Fictional) ⁵: Vesper Tilioz Yankın, Alteration Group, Playgrounds Institute,

Eldrýn Ilmvíxúlf, Scent Modulation and Identity Studies, Miðrás University of Media, Art and Biosystems,

Cagarallus Gemycelius, Institute for Mycelial Futures

The contemporary reframing of sensory augmentations as "perception alteration technologies" has intensified its use in inter-species relational practices. This shift emerged from early 21st-century transspecies movements and grassroots do-it-yourself collectives (mostly with human-originated members) such as the Batcave sonar community with human and bat-originated members, the scent-altered Wolf Pack Furries that have members who use smell to communicate, and the electrical current–based Myco-mmunes of humans, mushrooms and others, each reorganizing communication around newly engineered sensory ecologies. These virtual “Caves of Otherness” restrict interaction exclusively to their own altered perceptual channels, positioning additional sensory organs as gateways to experiential, social, and ecological becoming-other. In this study, we conducted a trio-ethnography with three sensorily altered researchers, one embedded in each community, over six months, living and communicating through modified perceptual infrastructures. Findings indicate that, while alteration technologies expand experiential potential and cultivate engagements among different species of same communities and with the notion of otherness, they simultaneously reproduce dynamics reminiscent of colonial and ableist structures: the systems designed still systemically discriminated practices such as exclusion of members with different versions of the technologies or origin species. We argue that future media multiverses must invest in communication practices that will prioritize relational practices, care, kinship, and co-habitation rather than relying only on sensory translations since this reductionist approach seem to re-center human values.

A9: Silence as Commons: An Ethnography of Deprivation Synchronization

Authors (Fictional) ⁶: Batu Aytemiz, Merceka Institute of Science,

Pelin Aytemiz, Laboratory of the Ordinary,

Chell Rattmann, Apertura Institute of Applied Sciences

Despite pervasive multiversal individuation, a growing number of youth communities practice deprivation synchronization — collective fasting from spirit-curated input to converge on a singular, unmediated reality. Participants disable their Ambient Wellbeing Monitor (or ’the leash’), tolerating distress alerts triggered by deviation from mediated baseline states, and sustain coordinated withdrawal. Because spirit-mediated individuation renders each participant's baseline experience incommensurable, we adopt a triangulated approach bridging first-person and spirit-first perspectives: observation of four synchronization circles, interviews with 29 participants, spirit modulation logs registering host-engagement deficit across all monitored sessions, and a researcher autoethnography. Most participants reported brief but vivid experiences of shared, unindividuated presence, though a significant number abandoned the practice due to discomfort with unfiltered perception, and effects dissipated rapidly upon re-engagement. Our own autoethnographic participation was curtailed prematurely, though the relational dynamics of this curtailment proved analytically productive. These findings suggest that interreal convergence on shared reality, while achievable through collective withdrawal, remains fragile and self-limiting.

A10: After Language: OpenClaw, Neural Mediation, and the Luxury of Friction in 2084

Author: Isaac Naor, Independent Researcher, Los Angeles, California, USA

In 2084, the public internet operates autonomously through OpenClaw-class agentic infrastructures, with minimal direct human participation. Human interaction is primarily mediated through high-bandwidth brain–computer interface (BCI) systems that enable direct cognitive exchange, significantly reducing reliance on spoken and written language in both distributed and co-present human interaction. This paper investigates the socio-technical consequences of post-linguistic communication within the Media Multiverse. Using archival analyses of early 21st-century Human–AI Interface governance experiments and contemporary ethnographic observations of neural-mediated publics, we examine how cortical protocol architectures regulate permissioning, provenance, and agency. Our findings suggest that while neural mediation increases coordination efficiency, it compresses interpretive ambiguity and narrows deliberative friction. We document the emergence of “Analog Commons” collectives who deliberately practice unaugmented speech, music, and embodied artistic production. In this context, language functions as a technologically reproduced luxury signal, while non-optimized human expression becomes a sign of cultural resistance and cognitive sovereignty.

A11: Opening Perspectives: Translationality as a Shared Civic Practice

Author: Danica Maier, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK

Nowadays, translation is understood as a foundational social ethos shaping interaction across culture and society. This retrospective study examines how this understanding developed. Drawing on archival curricula, community programmes, and early experiments from the mid-twenty-first century, we trace how extended notions of translation, alongside related artistic practices of speculation and not-knowing, were embedded into the core of education and community life. Gradually, this instilled conceptual frames through which difference, varied perspectives, and compassion came to be celebrated. These approaches reframed the concept of translation beyond language, producing a shared translational capacity. From early childhood, individuals are taught to recognise that divergent perspectives may arise from shared experiential ground, to remain present with difference, to acknowledge partial understanding without retreating into antagonism, and to navigate meaning across experiential, cultural, and mediatic boundaries. Rather than privileging singular claims to correctness, translation has been cultivated as an ongoing relational and conceptual practice. This conceptual widening has proved particularly significant within the plural conditions of the Media Multiverse, where individuals are increasingly required to navigate overlapping realities. This shift has fostered expanded forms of empathy and positional reflexivity and contributed to a marked decline in polarisation and top-down systems of control. Communication is instead characterised by practices of experiential comparison, openness to differing perspectives, and curiosity-driven engagement. We argue that the success of these developments lies in the expanded conceptualisation of translation as an ethical, experiential practice enabling people to see, know, and act while remaining open within a plurality of coexisting perspectives.

A12: The Perception Gap: Socioeconomic Disparities in Sensory Augmentation

Authors: Amber Maimon, Iddo Yehoshua Wald, Digital Media Lab, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

Sensory augmentation now offers perception of infrared radiation, magnetic fields, atmospheric composition, and wireless network activity. Beyond aspects of the physical world, augmentation can also provide a sensory-like perception of digital content layers, such as metadata about people, places, and things. Invasive neural interfaces and non-invasive wearable systems can produce transparent perceptual experience, but access to choice is uneven. We surveyed 500 augmented adults across income brackets on their sensory configurations. Higher-income users had access to a wider variety of sensory augmentation abilities with an average of 3.8 active modalities; lower-income users had limited access to some higher-end augmentation technologies and averaged 1.8 modalities. Higher-income users described "picking and choosing how I perceive the world", while lower-income users (≤ 60th percentile) described "upgrading my senses". In addition, 73% of participants reported discomfort around those who perceived "more" or "less" than they did. We review how this sensory inequality constrains employment and communication, demonstrating that unequal access to abilities such as thermal perception for emotion recognition, communication in inaudible frequencies, and invisible gatekeeping caused by digital reputation markers poses a risk to shared reality.

A13: Being vs becoming? Understanding the promises and challenges of the bioadaptive media multiverse Zeno

Authors: Mila Bujić, Mattia Thibault, Juho Hamari, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Since its release in 2081, Zeno has transformed how we travel, work, and even date. As the first XR infrastructure coupled with bioadaptative AI, it dynamically generates users’ perceptions of space, self, and time for ultra-personalised, as-if-real experiences; for example, as an overlay to continuously adapt mood for office hours, or experience entire holiday trips within hours. We conducted semi-structured interviews (N = 45) to understand how varying degrees of engagement shape lived experience, perceived stakes, and longer-term experiential trajectories. Based on the results, we developed a 2×2 Being–Becoming model along the axes of the degree of ontological exposure (Being) and goal-oriented optimisation (Becoming). Zeno occupies a High-Becoming/Low-Being basin, characterised by safety, persistence, and experiential saturation, but diminished existential stakes. We argue that while Zeno-like systems can be valuable, unchecked use risks collapsing the multiverse toward ontological attenuation (what we termed Zeno Drift), driven by the prevalence of experiences rich in sensation and continuity yet poor in irreversibility, vulnerability, and lived consequence. We conclude by outlining design strategies for maintaining plurality and preserving Being against total optimisation.

A14: OPIUM for the masses: Benchmarking Effectiveness against China's Great Firewall

Authors (Fictional): Winston Morphine, Poppy Seed from EU State Security Institute ⁷

With Project Eden, EU's ruling elites eliminated the middle class, the historical engine of revolutionary change, and walled off the lowerclass herd from themselves by creating Omni-Personalized Intrusive Ubiquitous Multimedia (OPIUM). OPIUM controls all electronic devices and information across the EU, continuously monitoring behavior and analyzing thought patterns. It places individuals into dynamical social bubbles, tailoring received information. By controlling information flows, OPIUM rewires world-understanding, castrating livestocks’ thoughts and actions of political relevance and redirecting disruptive sentiments away from rulers into harmless outlets. OPIUM is a light casting shadows on the wall. The shadows are the stocks’ reality. To assess effectiveness, we compared OPIUM with China's intranet-based social-credit-skinner-box-system using state-stability indicators across economic, political, social and cohesion dimensions, drawing on recent World Bank and WHO data. While the EU and China are economically comparable, OPIUM vastly outperforms China's intranet by eliminating entire threat dimensions, including political and social risks (e.g., human rights, state legitimacy) through adaptive mind-engineering. The only remaining relevant risk is internal fractionalization among rulers. We recommend weaponizing OPIUM against China.

A15: One Product, Many Realities: Manufacturing Plurality in the Industrial Media Multiverse

Author: Xinyi Tu, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

Industrial production increasingly yields media-layered artifacts, in which stable physical products are coupled with persistent digital layers that govern appearance, functionality, and lifecycle permissions. While industrial multiverse research has emphasized synchronization between physical and virtual systems, less attention has been paid to how manufacturing architectures produce plurality, enabling the same artifact to be enacted differently across heterogeneous media realities. We address this gap through a qualitative analysis of 42 product configurations and provisioning records from two automated facilities producing modular industrial wearables with XR-mediated visual overlays and updatable functional layers, complemented by engineer interviews (N = 20). The findings show that plurality is a designed feature, as fabrication decouples material stability from digital mutability, allowing product identity, appearance, and capability to diverge across interfaces without physical change. For example, a technician's wearable may initially display a customized XR interface with task-specific visual overlays, which, after a remote update triggered by revised safety rules, change along with certain functions while the hardware remains unchanged, so the device appears altered in XR but unchanged in compliance records because the certified hardware remains intact. We argue that the industrial multiverse shifts HCI from integration to supporting human interpretation, authorship, and accountability across coexisting product realities within a plural mediascape.

A16: Shifting Modalities of Spoken Interaction: Older Adults’ Recollections of Three Pre‑Layer Eras

Authors: Johanna Virkki, Tanja Vihriälä, Jaana Mäkinen, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland

This study analyses older adults’ recollections of interaction eras that preceded today's layered communication environments. Through narrative interviews with adults aged 75–101, ranging from those born in the mid‑1980s with embodied memories of pre‑smartphone interaction to younger cohorts who know earlier eras only through intergenerational accounts, we were able to draw on embodied, inherited, and hybrid forms of memory. Participants first identified and described the unlayered era, where communication relied on unmediated cues, gaze, timing, and micro‑expressions, and where attention was not divided across parallel channels. Interaction required active monitoring of the other person and mutual adjustment in real time. Second, in the smartphone era, handheld devices introduced attentional drift. Turn‑taking became irregular, pauses lengthened, and nonverbal signalling lost clarity as individuals routinely split focus between shared space and personal screens. Third, the early extended reality (XR) era overlaid informational elements directly into perception. Participants reported that these overlays redirected gaze, disrupted conversational pacing, and reduced the immediacy of embodied feedback. In our era of invisible, bio‑adaptive communicative layering, these past eras trace how earlier technologies progressively altered presence, coordination, and the social effort required to sustain meaningful spoken interaction.

A17: Improving Social-Physical Reconnection through Gameful Activity – The Return to Real-World Activity Protocol

Author (Fictional): The Last Ark Initiative ⁸

With the widespread adoption of the media-multiverse, people are increasingly able to create hyper-personalized realities. Consequently, many withdraw from social-physical contact into self-governed media cocoons. This exclusive interaction with artificial companions promotes narcissistic tendencies and degenerates social skills, directly accelerating human-contact anxiety disorders, inhibiting people from forming lasting social bonds. To address this, we draw on a phenomenon observed after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when many turned to multiplayer board games to reestablish social connections. This lost form of gaming provides a playful environment while putting participants into direct physical contact, enforcing more nuanced interactions. We propose the “Return to real-world activity” protocol and evaluate it in a longitudinal study with 1000 digital isolationists from the United European States. Participants are first exposed to weekly game sessions of CATAN (1995) over a ten-week period. The game combines cooperative and competitive decision-making, allowing participants to regain core social skills. In a second stage, non-digital team sports are introduced (i.e., team-based tag), engaging in body-colliding, raw, and unfiltered social sweat exchange. Results after a six-month protocol showed a 243% increase in dedicated offline time and 97% in continued relationship intention, currently making it the most effective tool in promoting social interactions.

A18: Subject/Object constructions in Hooman Communication

Author (Fictional): Octavia Shapesingersdottir ⁹

As gas-dwelling environments diminish and we liquid-dwellers become the dominant force on our planet, there is a growing urgency to document and archive the communication capacities of those species that live on the shrinking waterbreaks. Contact with those gas-dwellers who visit the surface on floatation devices and infrequently come below to our layer, those bi-pedal creatures who call themselves hoomans, are of particular interest as they appear to have a sophisticated capacity for symbolic thought. Early studies show that the act of forcing air through their bodies creates vibrations that can be heard and interpreted through the ears, those fin-like structures on their heads. We believe these vibrations have semantic content. In attempts to analyze a syntactic structure to these vibrations, this study attempts to demonstrate that hooman language constructs both subjects and objects, separating the oneness of the world into an us/them dichotomy. This is perhaps related to their bodies’ single brain and bilateral symmetry, which creates clear limitations compared to our distributed neuronal structure. In order to further these studies, we are creating skinfields, a bioidentical pigmented layer applied to hooman skin in an attempt to transmediate hooman language into a more comprehensible cephalopodal form. We give credit to Altantsetsegson, our hooman subject, and Ray Naylor, his progenitor, for their apparently keen interest in interspecies communication.

A19: When the Machine Notices Mushrooms for Us: Delegated Knowing in AI-Based Environmental Journalism

Author (Fictional): Clara Kenton, Institute for Posthuman Media Practices ¹⁰

By 2084, environmental journalism routinely relies on Generative AI-based Multispecies Translation Systems (GMTS) that convert otherwise imperceptible MtH cues—microbiome drifts in soil detected by AI felt as vibration patterns through synthetic‑skin wearables, or humidity fluctuations in a tree extrapolated into projected tree trajectories with wearable projectors—into real‑time journalistic ‘leads’. While widely celebrated for expanding what journalists can perceive in the field, GMTS also subtly reconfigure how environmental knowledge is sensed and validated. Yet little attention has been paid to how such systems reshape journalistic epistemic practice. This paper reports a 24-month ethnography of three forest correspondents using wearable GMTS during mushroom-season reporting. Through shadowing, sensory diaries, and analysis of AI-generated cues, we examine how stories are formed when fungal life is pre-interpreted by generative models. While GMTS provided “proofs” of anomalies that journalists described as once only “felt but hard to point at,” participants increasingly attributed discovery to the system over embodied engagements. Subtle cues -smell, moisture, insect traces that once were referenced in interviews- were often discounted when misaligned with AI confidence scores. We argue that while GMTS expanded perceptibility in human-mushroom engagements, it simultaneously automated noticing itself. By stabilizing fungal life into signals, the system reframed relational engagement as data retrieval. We contribute the concept of Delegated Knowing, describing how AI-mediated journalism risks relocating authority from situated observations to probabilistic translations, subtly reinforcing the ideology that technology can reveal the “ultimate truth” of MtH worlds.

A20: Designing a Halal Interoperability Protocol for Perceptual De-segregation

Author (Fictional): DM Ibrahim Pasha, Research Fellow at the Technical Madrassah of Medina 6 Orbital ¹¹

Thirty years after the Orbital Hijrah established the seven Medina space habitats at the Earth-Moon L5 Lagrange point (Hakki, 2071), the isolationist tendencies of the Restoration of the Age of Felicity are gradually being relaxed. The emergence of commerce networks has led to increased physical interactions with diverse space communities outside the Medina cluster. Mutually exclusive buffer realities filtering and shaping users’ perceptions have become the standard communicative mode in these interactions (Sezai, 2077). Built on Fiqhware embedding scripture into mediated communication, these buffer systems prioritized protection while constraining experiential depth (Nuri, 2080). A recent report by the authorities of Medina 6 Orbital, however, identified these limitations as detrimental to economic exchange and inconsistent with a fatwa mandating the extension of halal perceptual frameworks beyond the boundaries of Medina habitats (MedMec, 2083). In this regard, this research explores design parameters for the development of Sharia-compliant shared mixed realities, building on sectarian buffer protocols used between Medina orbitals. Mixed-reality exchange simulations are used to evaluate social, cultural, and legal translation across previously incompatible cosmologies. Early findings show tensions between increases in theological legibility and negotiated co-perception, suggesting that perceptual de-segregation requires reconfiguring protective logics rather than merely optimizing technical interoperability.

In this section, we reflect on the speculative abstracts, which we refer to as "A[AbstractNumber]" from this point on, and discuss the aspects that constitute the Media Multiverse.

Our collection of speculative abstracts focuses on the idea of the Media Multiverse as a counternarrative to the ideological discourses around the metaverse. Unsurprisingly, their analysis showcases that we are far from a common understanding of what the Multiverse can be. The concept seems to have stimulated the imagination of the authors, and the abstracts serve as attempts to explore the limits of the diversity, fragmentation, and plurality embodied by the Multiverse.

In this paper, we present 20 speculative abstracts, selected within 31 submissions from diverse disciplines, to reflect on the future of the mediascape through the concept of media multiverse. Based on this curated set of abstracts, we conducted a double process for analysis, including reflexive thematic analysis and close reading, to arrive at four dimensions that show the qualities of the proposed multiverse: (1) The technologies of the Media Multiverse, (2) Types of study as indicator of Multiversal experiences, (3) Ideology and criticality, and (4) Temporality of the Media Multiverse. This analysis, along with the speculative abstracts themselves, allowed us to outline an initial definition of the Media Multiverse and reflect on the methodological value of presenting speculative abstracts as a collection and analysing them collectively.

Our work has several limitations that also point to directions for future research. First, the 20 speculative abstracts presented in this paper provide only a partial exploration of what the Media Multiverse could become. Another limitation was that presenting all abstracts required a considerable amount of space in the paper, limiting the space we could dedicate to the analysis and discussion, which we therefore focused on providing a coherent initial analysis as a first step to understand what the Media Multiverse field could entail. Our analysis also carries a limitation, as the interpretation of the abstracts was shaped by the perspectives and expertise of the first three authors. To address this limitation, we included all 20 selected abstracts in the paper, so that the full collection of speculative abstracts is available for researchers to revisit, interpret, and analyze from their own perspectives in future work.

Through our analysis, we provided an initial look into the Media Multiverse. We invite future work to continue using participatory approaches to generate further speculative abstracts and build on our analysis through their own interpretations, to progressively develop a more grounded understanding of the possibilities of the future mediascape.

We have not used AI tools when writing the paper. The abstracts submitted by the authors were included directly in the paper without modification beyond formatting.