“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 works at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. She studied in Italy, Germany and Belgium while completing her M.A. in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies (IMACS). In her dissertation “Migrating through the Web”, published in 2022 (Link), she investigates serious games, newsgames, text-adventures, interactive maps and data visualizations that offer a humanitarian view over migration. For her postdoc she explores the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1946) in “playful simulations”, studying board games as an early example for serious games.

braidan[at]uni-mainz.de