Paper Emersions. Pop-up books, toys, and ephemera.
Fourth meeting of the itinerant seminary series. Convenors: Ilaria Ampollini, University of Ferrara; Elisa Marazzi, University of Milan.
Ferrara, Biblioteca Ariostea, 30 March 2026, 5pm
Chair: Roberto Manfredini (Università di Ferrara)
Ilaria Ampollini (Università di Ferrara)
Scienza da toccare, scienza per giocare
Michela Giacomelli (Università La Sapienza di Roma)
Sotto la pelle di carta. Libri anatomici interattivi tra Rinascimento e Modernità
Elisa Marazzi (Università degli Studi di Milano)
Tra meraviglie e tecnologie: i primi libri animati per ragazzi
The seminaries cycle Paper Emersions wants to focus on these kinds of sources, using ‘emersivity’ as a privileged perspective to study them.
The term ‘emersivity’ refers to how a given medium transcends its physical boundaries, thus creating an effective interference between media space and the space of the observer (or reader, or user). This is what happens today with augmented reality applications, through which the ‘real’ space comes alive with objects and content that are visible thanks to state-of-the-art optical devices – such as hololens for augmented reality. However, it is easy to see how this same characteristic can also be found in the past, in all those paper media featuring sophisticated technologies (Modena, 2022; Pinotti, 2021).
Emersivity also calls into question themes and problems of the history of science, of books and of reading: the need to understand, study and communicate natural phenomena stimulated the overcoming of the two-dimensionality of the printed page, proposing technical challenges that lead to challenge and transform the relationship with the book, based on tangible interaction.