Reworlding the Real through Interactivity

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.