The title of the first panel this afternoon, Drawing Real/Virtual Boundaries, erects a divide between real and virtual worlds, summoning us to examine the intellectual and territorial work of this dichotomy. Commonly referenced in relation to this divide is the distinction between a material, palpable, bodily existence and one that presents the essence of lived experiences, but is not in itself actual or in fact. However, the increasing ubiquity of digital and computational technologies as co-participants in so many aspects of our lives, raises questions about the experiential quality of our digitally mediated interactions, be they with objects or other people. Today we readily make reference to virtual universities, workplaces, communities, where the inhabitants are distributed in time and space and where the objects manipulated exist primarily as digital representations. We speak of virtual identities that we create ourselves as online personae or that others create for us (for example marketing companies or governmental agencies). We are said to have existences and identities outside the actual spaces and temporal frames in which we live day to day.

This raises issues about the embodied practices involved in constructing these virtual worlds or, perhaps more acurately, these multiple, transient encounters with the digital other. And just what kind of virtual spaces and identities we are creating? How do they reproduce old hierarchies and familiar social orders? How do they open up new possibilities, destabilize existing networks, make space for alternative renderings? These, of course, are questions that can not be answered in the abstract, but must be explored in their everyday enactments through empirical investigations of the here and now.

In our own work we have been particularly interested in relations between digital and paper documents, exploring new possibilities that emerge when documents are transformed from their paper, material manifestations into multiple digital renderings, as editable text or infinitely scaleable image views. Our focus has been on the translations required to move documents online, the work (by a diverse set of actors) involved in doing so, and the continuing relations (the co-habitations if you will) that are maintained between the material and digital document renderings. These document transformations are by no means one way streets, where documents once transformed live out their lives digitally, but instead the value of the transformation, in part, rests on the ability of these documents to move between their material and the virtual manifestations.

One of the issues that may well engage the next 20 years of work practice and technology research is finding creative ways to explore the ongoing and fundamental connections that exist between our digital and material realities. This may require new strategies that position and give us access to experiences radically translated by digital technologies. But to the degree we conceive these "virtual" experiences as constituted in part through embodied practices, then our old schemes of hanging out, watching, and joining in will continue to serve us well.