Frameless Experiences. For a multidisciplinary approach to immersive media

What does it mean, precisely, to speak of an unframed media experience? Does the disappearance of the visible frame around an image or screen truly imply a loss of mediation, or are we witnessing a shift in the logic of framing itself? This special issue investigates these questions by examining how different media – across formats, technologies, and sensory regimes – dismantle, disguise, or reconfigure their own representational boundaries. The central claim uniting these contributions is that unframing is never a pure absence of mediation, but rather a process of reframing, one that redistributes attention, agency, and sensory involvement across users, devices, and environments. The theoretical and historical lineage of ‘framing’ in visual culture spans from Alberti’s window to Simmel’s aesthetics, from film theory’s découpage to Foucauldian discourses of the gaze. In immersive and post-screen media, however, the traditional frame ‒ once easily locatable at the edge of the canvas or screen ‒ is no longer perceptually stable. It may now reside in the software that regulates the user’s interaction, in the spatial boundaries of a VR environment, in the directional logic of binaural sound, or in the proprioceptive rhythms of a body in motion. Rather than negating the frame, immersive media technologies externalize or internalize it – delegating framing operations to the user’s body, the designer’s algorithms, or the environment itself. This phenomenon is approached from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the essays here collected.