Call for Participation
This expert workshop invites scholars and practitioners to explore the legal, regulatory, and policy implications of what we term the editable world, a socio-technical condition in which the physical environment becomes subject to real-time computational rendering.
Digital infrastructures are no longer confined to screens, platforms, or online spaces. With the rapid development of spatial computing, extended reality (XR), and AI-enabled wearable devices, digital systems are becoming embedded directly into perception, mobility, and everyday encounters. Streets, classrooms, workplaces, public institutions, and civic spaces are turning phygital: hybrid environments in which physical reality is continuously annotated, filtered, augmented, and personalized through computational layers.
While existing research and regulation have focused extensively on digital platforms, online discourse, and data governance, far less attention has been paid to environments where digital systems no longer merely mediate communication, but actively interfere with seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world. In such contexts, perception itself becomes a site of intervention; public space becomes physically shared but also digitally customized; and longstanding conceptual distinctions between online and offline, public and private, infrastructure and interface begin to erode.
The workshop starts from the premise that editable reality is not a speculative future scenario. It is already emerging through prototypes, pilot deployments, design choices, and regulatory blind spots. At the same time, the idea of “editing the world” is not entirely new. Humans have always curated their environments socially, culturally, and spatially, by forming communities, choosing neighborhoods, and shaping boundaries of belonging and exclusion. What distinguishes the editable world today is a new mode of curation: one that operates through real-time perceptual mediation, individualized algorithmic layers, and continuous computational rendering of physical reality. Editing shifts from visible, collective, and slow-moving social practices to individualized, adaptive, and often opaque interventions embedded directly into perception.
This transformation raises urgent questions for law, policy, and governance. Who governs phygital spaces when digital layers are controlled by private platforms while physical spaces remain subject to public law? How should legal systems conceptualize public space when it is no longer a singular, stable entity, or uniformly shared? What happens to legal notions of privacy, dignity, autonomy, and consent when perception itself becomes a site of data extraction, inference, nudging, and, in particular in the context of digital sexualized violence, abuse? And how can democratic accountability be preserved when citizens inhabit different versions of the same physical environment?
These dynamics expose a growing governance vacuum, in which public law regimes governing physical space coexist uneasily with privately governed digital layers that increasingly structure visibility, access, and behaviour.
The workshop also recognizes that the editable world is shaped by economic incentives and political economy. Much like the early Internet, phygital environments risk a trajectory from openness toward enclosure, as proprietary business models, monetization of perception, and platorm-based gatekeeping reshape access to and participation in physical public space. This raises familiar yet unresolved questions about power asymmetries, privatization of shared infrastructures, and the role of competition, data, and intellectual property law in governing perceptual environments.
Thematic Areas
We invite contributions that engage with the editable world as a new object of governance, including, but not limited to, the following thematic directions:
- Governing phygital public spaces: allocation of authority between platforms, device manufacturers, municipalities, states, and institutions; regulatory tools for digital overlays in streets, transport hubs, schools, hospitals, courts, and other sensitive spaces.
- Perception, representation, and rights: interpersonal surveillance, involuntary inference and representational manipulation, including sexualized mmachine-generated content such as deepfakes, and the limits of existing data protection and AI regulation when harms arise from perception rather than content.
- Democratic accountability and shared reality: fragmentation of public space, erosion of the conversational common ground for democratic deliberation, and institutional or regulatory designs aimed at safeguarding shared visibility and shared facts.
- Economic incentives and the political economy of phygital spaces: business models, digital ecosystem dynamics, competition and economic power, data governance, intellectual property, and the risk of enclosure of perceptual infrastructures traditionally associated with the public realm.
- Historical, sociological, and philosophical perspectives: longer trajectories of world-editing, social filtering, and spatial segregation, and how these practices are transformed when they become automated, personalized, and embedded directly into perception and sound.
The workshop is conceived as a space for exploration of theories, concepts, and a new vocabulary, interdisciplinary exchange, and collaborative agenda-setting. Rather than finalized papers, we welcome position papers, conceptual frameworks, early-stage research, and provocative theses that can benefit from collective discussion. We invite early-career researchers, advanced scholars, representatives of civil society, and practitioners to submit their abstracts by July 15 to editable-worlds@mpil.de. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out latest by August 15. Abstracts should not exceed 500 words and should be accompanied by a short biography of not more than 150 words.
To facilitate a fruitful exchange, all selected speakers will be asked to submit a written contribution of 1500 to 2500 words by October 4, 2026, which will be shared among all participants.
In exceptional cases, funding for travel and/or accommodation may be considered upon request.