RHIZOMEMIND

What does it mean to be “present” in an increasingly digitalized world? This area of research moves beyond critique to consider the creative, speculative, and sensory possibilities that digital systems open up. From video calls that highlight the strangeness of one’s bodily appearance, to interactive environments that suspend orientation altogether, we ask: how is presence digitally constructed, fragmented, or felt? How do digital technologies, including AI, stretch and complicate our experience of being here, now, somewhere, and with one another?  

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Drawing from phenomenological accounts of embodiment (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 2012; Alia Al-Saji, 2014), we understand perception not as a passive reception of information, but as a mode of situated engagement—one that AI increasingly participates in, not merely as a tool but as a way of being. In this light, boundaries between physical and virtual, between proximity and distance, become increasingly unsettled. As perception is redistributed across human and machine systems, we are prompted to rethink how the digital gives rise to new existential conditions—ones in which presence, agency, and spatiality are no longer anchored in a single body or place, but co-constituted across environments and infrastructures (e.g. N. Katherine Hayles, 2012).   

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Within this framework, we are particularly concerned with how digital technologies might foster a grounded respect for differences—not by returning to fixed or normative models of embodiment and spatiality, but by expanding what counts as presence in the first place. Here, presence is not about a full reproduction of real-world experience in digital form, but a becoming—shaped through disorientation, latency, glitch, or even breakdown. Digitally mediated perception, then, does more than expose the limitations or losses associated with supposed disembodiment (here indexed through geographical displacement or restriction of senses). It can also generate new conditions for attention—making space to honor what is present, while simultaneously opening perceptual and affective pathways toward what might yet emerge (e.g. Jennifer Gabrys, 2016).   

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Rather than treating technological mediation as a condition to be overcome, we approach it as a site of creative tension—where presence becomes negotiated, partial, and affectively charged. In this space, we explore how new forms of environmental and intersubjective experience emerge. We imagine a future where presence is not defined by seamless connection or stable identity, but by the capacity to sense otherwise—across thresholds, bodies, and worlds.