EME 18 (1+2) pp. 43–55 Intellect Limited 2019 Explorations in Media Ecology Volume 18 Numbers 1 & 2 © 2019 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eme.18.1-2.43_1 www.intellectbooks.com 43 ABSTRACT By applying Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad, this article proposes and responds to the question, ‘[h]ow does mixed reality change and create social environments?’. Historical examples of media as tools and modes of experience are described and assessed in order to reveal traces of the old and the ancient found in mixed real- ity. These examples include the Palais de l’electricité of 1900 and the medieval palimpsest. The article concludes with the argument that mixed reality foretells a new age of consumption. Seeing something new: Joining of the virtual and the actual The virtual is now a central principle for organizing individual life, most significantly for the domains of politics, business and consumption. It has become a means by which knowledge and being are understood. Using virtual simulations, insurance companies generate and respond to new knowledge about changing risk levels. Virtual worlds, including Second Life, allow users to assume new social roles and identities, to ‘become’ someone else. However, the virtual is not a new category. Religious ritual from time immemorial has been a virtual experience because it is liminal, a state of becoming. To locate virtual worlds in context with other media, the virtual may be distinguished from the actual, the abstract from the concrete and the hyperreal KEYWORDS mixed reality McLuhan’s tetrad new media palimpsest media history Aura MARCO ADRIA University of Alberta Reading the grand palimpsest of mixed reality