“Migrating to the Web” investigates how interactive practices produce and are influenced by a specific view over migration. The project analyses serious games, newsgames, text-adventures, interactive maps, and data visualization as “cultural artifacts”. It proposes to study these practices as material objects which by emphasizing innovation quickly risk disappearing, but also as elements in a larger media ecosystem. The work argues that these practices embed two specific humanitarian views, which mobilize technological affordances like interactivity to support an “ethic of empathy” and make use of data infrastructures and operational images to produce an imaginary of (incoming) emergency.

Nicole Braida is a film and media scholar currently working as a freelance curatorial assistant for the exhibition “Shadows” at the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum. In 2025, she worked in Italy as a Content Specialist at Ikon Digital Farm, curating immersive and interactive media for museums. She received her PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2021. In 2022, her dissertation, “Migrating through the Web: Interactive Practices about Migration, Flight and Exile”, was published open access by transcript Verlag. From 2021 to 2024, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the DiCi-Hub (Digital Cinema Hub) project at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, where she investigated data-driven histories of Super 8. She has taught several courses in Germany and Italy on digital methods and interactive media. Her most recent publications include “From the Small Screen to the Big Screen: The Super 8 Distribution of the ‘Sandokan’ TV Series,” published in “Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal”.

ni.braida@gmail.com