This paper addresses philosophical questions that are relevant to virtual reality (VR) developers, designers, and artists. It argues that some objects in VR really exist, and some of these virtual objects that exist are really what they appear to be. Digital art, like digital photography, 3D models, and interactive art installations in VR environments, are real art. Unlike art, nature in VR cannot be real nature, and experiences of nature in VR are illusory. However, VR nature can be real art, and VR art can elicit experiences of the sublime. This paper also offers suggestions of how to design sublime experiences in VR.

We register a need for novel ways of collaborative artistic work beyond solitary authorship or functional differentiation, on one hand, and unified, synchronised collective production, on the other hand. We propose that a transversal understanding of different kinds of spaces—spaces of thought, aesthetic spaces, and physical spaces—leads to a method for this envisioned new collaborative approach, and to include a horizontal nexus between spatial functions (workspace, exhibition space). We present three study cases and experiences that informed our approach, suggesting particular techniques that facilitated a “singular plural” perspective on artistic creation. We finally ask how this may help addressing the limitations of artistic online work.

The human imagination received a discursive gain regarding its societal and economic importance as a cognitive resource in the course of the 20th and 21st century. This situation motivated the emergence of imagination techniques of which we discuss several briefly in this paper. The various formations of ‘speculative’ strategies within art and design can be seen as a recent extension to this tendency. While such strategies are usually predominantly visual, we suggested in our earlier research and practice (‘The Institute of Sonic Epistemologies’) that aural techniques might be equally suited to stimulate the human imagination, since such approaches leave the visual senses open for mental imagery in the human mind. We found these early explorations to be fruitful and decided to further our understanding of the aesthetic, fictional and medial factors being at work when aural environments trigger the human imagination. Against this backdrop, the present article is a working paper on ‘aurally-induced mental imagery’ that covers a literature overview of the neuropsychology of the human imagination and discusses an eclectic corpus of sound work, which we query for the above-mentioned factors.

This paper examines recent artistic engagements with analogue media in audiovisual art practices, commonly known as neo-analogue media practices. These practices and cultures of creative production often revive and repurpose older media technologies as well as devise analogue-digital media hybrids. These hybrid forms are commonly affiliated with a post-digital aesthetic, prone to blur established dichotomies between old and new media as well as digital and non-digital realms. Neo-analogue hybrids can then be understood as a reaction to the post-digital condition by taking a critical stance towards common connotations of the term digital and engaging media hybridization as a form of resistance against the hegemony of digital technologies.