The contemporary pervasive consumption of and dependence on digital devices, forces us to redefine our ontological status starting from the space we occupy, in-between the organic and the inorganic and between the real and the fictitious. Our knowledge of reality is the knowledge of a subject living on ontological thresholds.

As Jason Farman states in “Embodiment and the Mobile Interface”. Mobile Interface Theory (London: Routledge, 2012): “the virtual is not the opposite of the real, instead it is a component of experiencing the real.” The epistemological and the ontological doubts are Siamese twins.

Today, law and literature are a privileged platform for taking issue with enhanced complexity of the ontology of the referential basis in today’s media and semiotic systems and with the epistemological problems generated on and by this threshold.

Which are the scenarios and topics that contemporary literature and visual arts are tracing to describe our present threshold-reality and lead us into the ontologically and epistemologically open future of shared humanity? What is the historical background for generation of this situation and how can it inspire the imagination of the future? How are the arts determining our digital and non-digital imagination (let us think of augmented reality, for instance)? How can new forms of representation open a discussion on the relationship between technology and society?

In a liminal world that in several areas transcends what the law is capable of framing both with regard to formal law and a shared sense of justice how does the law act in and react to the pervasive digitizing of social life, biological reality and cultural norms and re-articulation of social and cultural rights?

How does the citizen’s perception of the law, of what is licit/illicit, change in a world of rapid transformation of social norms and ethical values? What are the legal conditions for an effective regulation of the media and the world they shape? How can new laws become part of a new collective sense of justice?

Since in our contemporary age the digital permeates the category of values and the mechanisms of representation of reality, the topic can investigate the following questions:

• How does the legal dimension cope with this new digital world?

• Is the legal system ready to accept this new/ human/social/cultural condition?

• What is the status of legal responsibility?

• How do minds and media reciprocally shape one another?

• How does print literature register the effects of a digitized world?

• How does digital ontology negotiate its relation to the domain of digital aesthetics?

• How does digital ontology relate to epistemology?

• How do digital literature and the media mirror the transformative power of digital technology?

• Is digital literature a direct cause of that transformation?

• What is the relation between digital narratives and traditional reading practices?

This event is endorsed by Academia Europaea#

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