Immersive Methods for Environmental Ethics

In preparation

I’m currently developing a research initiative that animates environmental ethics with new methods that utilize immersive technology and art. My vision is to create a collaborative research-creation space for interdisciplinary projects that seek to stimulate our ecological imagination. The space of these collaborations could take the form of a lab in a University or a public exhibition. I’m seeking new collaborators within environmental ethics, media studies, and digital arts as well as potential host institutions.

To create a world that sustains the common good, we must reconsider what it means to exist as a collective. By drawing on immersive technology and art, this project in environmental ethics probes the relationship between global sustainability and collectivity.

I see aesthetic experience as having ethical import when it helps us reimagine our relationship to other bodies and, what is more, all of material life as a single body. Immersive technology and art offer us experiences that challenge our fundamental relationship to space and borders. Aesthetic experience can offer the sensation of having one’s body dissolve into natural landscapes which are themselves pulsating, animated forces, requiring our (self) care. Such experiences can be simultaneously informative, disorienting, and transformative.

A collaboration space equipped with immersive technology may be used to conduct research, educate, and inspire. Researchers could use such a space to create simulations of concrete global systems that reshape our social and political existence. Artists and writers could utilize this space to tell imaginative stories about the ongoing life of earthlings into the distant future. Philosophers could utilize this space to give life to concepts that might transform our world by inspiring ontological shifts in our relationship each other and the planet. The ultimate purpose of a lab for environmental ethics and immersive arts is to blend concrete and imaginative approaches to realizing the common good of our collective existence. 

My envisioned project embraces a spirit of optimism as if our life depends on it—I believe it does. This research, experimentation, and creation are not directed toward a place and time the lies elsewhere. Creating immersive visions of possible futures can immediately transform our social and political existence in order to sustain the ongoing life of planet earth.

Collaborations that inspire me: teamLab, Marshmallow Laser Feast