Author Information
Kok Yoong Lim, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam, VietnamAgnieszka Kiejziewicz, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Vietnam, Vietnam
Abstract
This article examines how technologically mediated micro-environments reconfigure human–plant relations and environmental closeness in the Digital Anthropocene. While current debates on the digital observation of nature have primarily centered on fauna, we address a gap in biopolitical framing by speculating on the possibility of attributing agency to plants in technologically mediated environments. Referring to Baudrillard’s hypernature concept, Foucault’s biopower, Vogel’s post-naturalist environmental philosophy, and affective ecology, we inquire: Can a digitally mediated micro-environment evoke affective responses comparable to real nature? How might such installations reassert the primary human right to nature and what new aesthetics or ethical laws emerge in the process? Observing that environmental closeness is always already mediated, and that vegetal life is increasingly enrolled in regimes of care, commodification, and control, we adopt Critical Discourse Analysis to read selected art and design projects as cultural texts that script human-plant interaction. Our examples, ranging from miniature domestic ecologies, through mobile and site-specific gardens, to technologically organized, plant-media telematic systems, reveal three recurrent modalities: (1) miniaturisation and control, (2) domestication and commodification, and (3) technological entanglement. Across these modalities, we identify three core paradoxes structuring mediated plant relations: care vs control, intimacy vs commodification, and agency vs instrumentalisation. In conclusion, we propose an approach acknowledging media interfaces as tools redistributing environmental proximity while also governing plants as vegetal commons. This state can be further negotiated through progressive media designs and frameworks, allowing for the attribution of agency to plants. This approach enables to reframe the right to nature as a right to companionship and presence, introduced through the suitable protocols of care.
Paper Information
Conference: KAMC2025Stream: Climate Change and Arts
This paper is part of the KAMC2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Lim K., & Kiejziewicz A. (2026) Digitally Mediated Micro-environment as a Vector of Environmental Closeness ISSN: 2436-0503 – The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2025: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 621-629) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.50
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2436-0503.2025.50
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