Audiovisual (AV) archives constitute the mnemonic record of the 20th and 21st centuries, capturing everyday life, historical events, and culturally significant moments through their rich multimodality. While large-scale digitisation efforts and the increasing production of born-digital materials have expanded these collections, access for the general public remains limited due to multiple barriers. First, a structural access gap remains, as legal and institutional constraints continue to restrict public dissemination despite widespread digitisation. Second, a representational gap stems from the limitations of metadata-driven interfaces in capturing the multimodal and exploratory nature of AV archives. Third, a participatory gap emerges when immersive technologies favour visual spectacle over performative potential.

This inquiry addresses the challenge of enhancing access to digital AV archives through situated, embodied experiences tailored to diverse museum-going audiences. It investigates how interactive and immersive installations can support situated encounters with AV archives, through a transdisciplinary approach that integrates theoretical inquiry, technical development, and empirical evaluation. The research engages with collections spanning dance performances, sports events, television broadcasts, concert recordings, and early silent cinema, exploring how each may be experienced anew through computational and spatial reconfigurations.

The dissertation is structured around two interrelated perspectives. First, it investigates how visitors engage with AV archives in embodied ways through interactive technologies that spatialise archival content as an architecture of participation. Visitors co-construct archival paths through their interactions, shaping both their own experience and that of other spectators. To capture this process, a five-dimensional embodied framework is proposed. Second, the dissertation examines how computational methods are employed to sculpt AV archives for embodied exploration. This includes processes of datafication and vectorisation, forms of algorithmic vision that transform audiovisual content into feature spaces, and computational mappings that render these spaces navigable within immersive systems.

In conclusion, the dissertation reflects on the transformation of AV archives into situated, interactive experiences as a practice of experimental museology. It offers both practical insights for cultural heritage stakeholders and a conceptual framing informed by the theories of Deleuze's virtuality and Simondon's transduction. Through these lenses, the research conceptualises the archive's transformation, from a digital repository to an architecture of participation and, ultimately, to emergent archival paths, as a creative process enacted by both designers and visitors.