With the third edition of Live Interfaces, it seems useful to share some reflections on how its mission motivates iterative experimentation. Of course a media-rich journal presents challenges of preservation and dissemination: digital platforms are ephemeral, and black boxes of code limit our control over the medium. Yet the challenge extends far beyond technical issues. Rather than prescribing subjects and formats, the editorial process keeps interrogating the methods through which creative processes and spherical ways of thinking might advance knowledge. Such openness requires working intensively with the authors: consistency emerges from continuous discovery. It requires a delicate balance between the singularity of each author’s voice, the scientific transparency of their argument, and the clarity needed for a cross-disciplinary readership. It highlights a need for acknowledging grey zones between disciplinary fields, cultural backgrounds and argumentation modes.

This third edition features three contributions. Using speculative coding and AI, one examines how videogame programming can become a creative practice. Bridging Eastern philosophy and Western media history, another considers how personal experience can ground a multifaceted, fluid notion of interface. Drawing from sound art and therapeutic practices, yet another explores how collaborative creation can act as a form of activism and collective resilience.

The reader is now invited to place the notions of ‘liveness’ and ‘interface’ at ground level, so as to vitalise their understanding. The term ‘interface’ may describe a shared boundary, a point of interaction, or a connection between two entities. Whether it refers to the boundary itself or to the mechanisms that enable interaction, the result is greater than the sum of its parts: the in-between becomes something of its own, irreducible to the elements it connects.

Editor: Adriana Sá