RHIZOMEMIND

A geographic space modulates experience through shifting narratives and temporal traces, complicating how it is perceived over time. Digital technologies do not simply depict this world but actively mediate how we engage with it. They layer data, memory, and context—offering more-than-visible dimensions that reframe how space is sensed, interpreted, and inhabited (e.g. Maureen Engel, 2018; Kate Nash, 2021). Crucially, such mediation does not ultimately determine the sum of possible experiences (i.e. technological determinism), as our media landscape—and our place within it—is indeed as complex as it appears.

 

A significant aspect of this mediation is that it complicates our understanding of embodiment and place. On one hand, digital technologies introduce new modes of disconnection, mediating experience in ways that risk abstraction, automation, and a sense of placelessness. On the other, they open up possibilities for reconfiguring how we sense, inhabit, and act within environments, enabling new forms of perception and agency through affective interfaces (e.g. Mark Hansen, 2006), networked sensibilities (e.g. Anna Munster, 2013), and hybrid realities (e.g. Mel Slater, 2018)—concepts explored across fields from media theory to environmental humanities. These frameworks challenge us to think beyond simple binaries of immersion versus detachment, asking instead how digitally mediated environments might restructure the terms of relationality and spatial belonging.

 

Emerging technologies like AI and VR [1] complicate this dynamic of reconfiguration. At first glance, VR may appear to extract users from the world, replacing embodied immediacy with immersive simulation; similarly, AI systems seem to automate perception and narrative construction, potentially reducing users to passive observers within algorithmically determined environments. Yet such technologies do not simply displace embodiment—they also reconfigure it. In experimental arenas of virtual experience (e.g. metaverse), we are witnessing the emergence of new modes of virtual embodiment, in which sensory cues, gestures, and affective states are transposed into digital interfaces. These developments raise new questions about how technologically mediated perception translates into spatial awareness and ethical responsiveness. 

 

This tension becomes especially pronounced in the realm of environmental awareness and activism, where the global reach and ubiquity of digital systems stand in contrast to the geographical specificity of ecological crisis. How do we navigate the disjuncture between the planetary scale of digital media and the grounded, local urgencies of environmental action? What forms of situatedness are made possible—or foreclosed— by platforms that enable us to witness environmental degradation in places we may never physically encounter? What are the ways that digital systems do, in fact, connect us to place in manners that prompt attention, care, or action? In this field of inquiry, we are concerned not only with how technologies mediate experience, but with how they condition new relational configurations between bodies, data, spaces, and practices. 

 

[1] Though the technical basis of virtual reality (VR) has a long research lineage, its broader cultural and affective potentials remain emergent. Infrastructure, platforms, and modes of access continue to evolve, while its experiential grammars and ethical frameworks are far from settled. In contexts such as media arts, digital environmentalism, sensory perception, VR’s potential remains speculative and experimental rather than fully realized, or even widely commercialized. Likewise, the emergent status of artificial intelligence (AI) reflects ongoing critical debates across public, academic, and artistic domains. Its meaning (as a creative tool, decision-maker, or co-agent) is still being shaped beyond their original computational contexts. Taken together, AI and VR function as dynamic systems of mediation— technologies that not only shape but are themselves shaped by narrative, aesthetic, and epistemological choices. These choices, in turn, condition how users perceive, navigate, and make meaning within digitally mediated environments.