Guest Editor: Alexander S. Lenkevich

The second issue of volume 7 of Galactica Media is dedicated to the study of interfaces as mediators of embodiment, affect, and subjectivity in the digital age. The thematic focus of this issue is on experimental forms of interface interaction, where the digital body ceases to be a transparent mediator and becomes a site of resistance, deconstruction, and critical rethinking.

The issue opens with an introductory article by editor Alexander Lenkevich, in which the interface is presented as a key infrastructure of contemporary experience — not only a technical mediator but also an ontological operator that structures perception, control, and identity. Special attention is paid to radical artistic, gaming, and philosophical practices that seek to go beyond the normative embodiment embedded in digital platforms.

The issue is structured into three thematic sections:

1. Bodies and Affects — includes articles on bodily deconstruction in games (Lenkevich and Latypova), media trauma and the Procrustean interface (Skomorokh), ontological styles of gameplay (Ocheretyany), and cringeplay as a marginal form of subjectivation (Kirichenko).
2. The Lives of Others — devoted to the philosophy of the face and neural network agents (Dydrov and Varlamova), digital practices of care for the self and the interface as an existential medium (Mukhina), the metasimulacrum of otherness and post-symbolic coloniality (Aliev), interfaces of ethnographic video games and technoshamanism (Malenko), as well as the prospects of political ecology through hybrid interface collectives in the interpretation of Bruno Latour’s philosophy (Penner).
3. Interfaces in Culture — explores the sacred and divinatory aspects of digital interfaces (Azarov), architecture as an interface of connection and rupture (Iakovleva), feminist rethinking of algorithmic culture through textile metaphors (Kolesnikova), and science fiction tropes of the interface and neural metaphors in the cyberpunk works of William Gibson (Bakumenko, Baklanov, and Baklanova).

This issue is intended for media scholars, philosophers, cultural theorists, and anyone interested in digital embodiment, posthumanism, critique of platform rationality, and new forms of sensibility in the age of interfaces.