| Summary: | Although Karen Ruffle (2021b) finds that commemorations of Karbala are "intersensorial," Babak Rahimi and Mohsen Amin (2020) have observed their digitization. Scholars researching technological mediation via mechanical reproduction and the electrical grid, then analogue and digital technologies, have routinely concluded that technological mediation "decay[s]" (Benjamin 1936), "numbs" (McLuhan 1964), "amputates" (Kittler 1986), or "closes off" (Lupton and Maslen 2018) sensoria. The digitization of something perceived to be intersensorial is therefore paradoxical. To understand this paradox, this article borrows from Wendy Willems's (2021) understanding of "relational affordances" and Patrick Eisenlohr's (2021) concept of "atmospheric citizenship" to expound an expression of digital bereavement in which the whole sensorium is activated, animated, and entangled: the videos of Royall Records, led by Nadeem Sarwar, founded in Pakistan, and based in Australia. An elaboration of their intersensoriality challenges idealist and techno-determinist views of digitality, in which the digital is held, contradictorily, to be at once an immaterial other and a material barrier. This article posits digital atmospheres as a way of articulating this challenge.
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