El Meta-espectador: Ontologia, Protesis y Cuerpo en el Usuario de XR

This paper was presented in 6th version of CINCOMA, Congreso Internacional de Innovación en Comunicación y Medios Audiovisuales (International Congress on Innovation in Communication and Audiovisual Media), which took place between the 24th and 26th of September 2025, in Alicante, Spain. It has been published with the conference proceedings by Dykinson Libros, edited by Tatiana Hidalgo-Marí and Javier Herrero-Gutiérrez.

This paper hypothesises on the notion of notion of meta-spectatorship and the figure of the meta-spectator, and ontological category proposed to refer to users of digital arts and narratives – specifically of XR media – through digital devices. The meta-spectator would be separated from the spectator in several ways: They don’t spectate, but adopts a participate agency, that is conditioned by the technology itself; they are defined based on their dependency of digital devices to access and participate of narrative media, to the extent that this relation becomes prosthetic, affecting the meta-spectator’s perception of their own body and driving cognitive adaptations to the conditions proposed by the prostheses and the media. This affectation also has effects on the relation with space and, by extension, with otherness. Finally, while this paper focuses on the ontological analysis of this proposed category, it also opens the door to further study of how the meta-spectator forms part of system of relations, operating as a Foucauldian dispositif, in which their own identity is constantly redefined in a series of power relations with the other components of the system: the technology and the content.

English version available on request.

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