A Limitless Frontier?
Imagining Human-Environment Relationships in
Virtual Reality
Claire Fitch
- June 2019 -
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A Limitless Frontier?
Imagining Human-Environment Relationships in
Virtual Reality
Masters Thesis University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Social Sciences Human Geography- Environmental Track
June 2018 Claire Fitch: 12136832
Supervisors: dhr. dr. J. Joeri Scholtens dhr. M.A. Andres Verzijl Second Reader: Dr. ir. Y.P.B (Yves) van Leynseele
iii Abstract
This research project is interested in the way that nature is constructed and represented in virtual reality (VR) cyberspace. Studying virtual natures can offer insight into the way humans conceptualize material natures, as virtual cyberspaces are imbued heavily with the semiotic designs of their programmers and users (Lange, 2001). As all virtual natures are programmable spaces, they are constituted by narrative and symbolic practices of meaning-making that work to illustrate and re-inscribe human ontologies of nature (Clark, 2014). Key to this investigation of cybernetic representations of nature is the idea that human-environment relationships take unique form in virtual reality. This is due to the incredibly immersive quality of VR as a medium, and subsequent phenomena of dematerialization, embodiment, and ephemerality that shape users' experience of being-in-space (Kilteni, 2005). This has implications for the way that human-environment relationships are re-imagined and re-designed in cyberspace. In order to explore these virtual human-environment relationships a case-study approach is used to investigate two virtual natures. Various methods are used in conjunction to form a cohesive narrative about the two case studies. Through careful analysis of this layered data set, this research concludes that human-environment relationships represented in virtual reality take a unique form due to the geographic qualities of virtual cyberspace. These representations draw heavily on the users’ and designers’ conceptualizations of material human-environment relationships, and may serve as an arena where these ideas are reiterated, interacted with, or challenged.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Joeri and Andres for their exceptionally formative roles in this project- particularly for the immense time and consideration they invested in guiding me through this complex and at times mystifying topic. A thousand thanks for constantly providing thoughtful and illuminating feedback. I’d also like to thank Marco Otto at the Network Institute for opening the doors of his lab up to me, and helping me through the process of virtual reality research. Thanks to the Next Nature Network for sharing their fascinating project with me, and for their generous and incredibly helpful gift of the Next Nature Book. Warm thanks to Daniel Fraga for an enlightening and riveting conversation that has kept my mind whirring throughout this process. Further thanks to John and Ria Carline for their gracious engagement, warmth, and openness in our interviews. Finally, a big thank you to the UvA for facilitating this project, and to Yves for reading and assessing this work.
v Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction ... 1
Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework ... 3
2.1 Choice of theories ... 3
2.2 Ontologies of nature ... 3
2.2.1 Social natures ... 4
2.3 Human-environment relationships ... 6
2.3.1 Speculative human-environment relations ... 8
2.4 Cyberspace ... 10
2.4.1 Virtual reality (VR) cyberspace ... 12
2.5 Conceptual scheme ... 15
Chapter 3: Research Questions ... 17
Chapter 4: Methodology ... 18
4.1 Research in cyberspace ... 18
4.2 Epistemological position ... 18
4.3 Case-study approach ... 18
4.3.1 Nature Treks VR ... 19
4.3.2 The Next Nature Habitat ... 19
4.4 Methods employed: A note on layeredness ... 19
4.4.1 Thick description ... 20
4.4.2 Content analysis ... 20
4.4.3 Interviews ... 21
4.5 Scope and limitations ... 21
Chapter 5: Nature Treks Results ... 23
5.1 Designing Nature Treks ... 24
5.2 Researching in nature ... 26
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5.4 Using Nature Treks ... 31
5.5 Being-in Nature Treks ... 34
Chapter 6: Next Nature Habitat Results ... 37
6.1 Designing our next habitat ... 38
6.2 The habitats ... 40
6.2.1 The Garden of Eden ... 41
6.2.2 The Modernist Dream ... 42
6.2.3 The Techno Favela ... 44
6.2.4 The Hypernatural Resort ... 45
6.2.5 Reflection ... 47
6.3 The Next Nature Network ... 47
Chapter 7: Analysis ... 52
7.1 Representations of nature ... 52
7.2 Human-environment relationships ... 53
7.3 Virtual cyberspace ... 54
7.4 Personal reflection ... 55
Chapter 8: Conclusion and Outlook ... 57
8.1 Answer to research question ... 57
8.2 Implications for the future ... 57
8.2.1 Representing nature ... 58
8.2.2 Imagining nature ... 59
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Table of Figures
Fig 1. A snapshot of the ‘Green Bamboo’ environment ... 23
Fig 2. A snapshot of the ‘Orange Sunset’ environment ... 23
Fig 3. Instructions illustrate how to ‘walk’ through Nature Treks ... 24
Fig 4. Advertising for NT emphasizes its emotional impact ... 25
Fig 5. The Transitorium building in early spring, featuring blue skies and leafless trees ... 26
Fig 6. The Nature Treks homepage ... 27
Fig 7. Virtual hands with a few creator orbs ... 28
Fig 8. I hold up a fruit I’ve made from my creator orbs, while the dragon flies towards a rainbow ... 30
Fig 9. Sunlight illuminates a whale and dolphin swimming near me ... 31
Fig 10. A user posts a video on YouTube of his reaction to Nature Treks... 32
Fig 11. Users sit in an installation of the Next Nature Habitat ... 37
Fig 12. Where each environment falls on the born-made, control-beyond control axis ... 38
Fig 13. The first image shown in the Garden of Eden- your cave ... 41
Fig 14. Translucent objects fill the Modernist Dream ... 42
Fig 15. Gray buildings surround you and float high above you in the Techno Favela... 44
Fig 16. Pink flowers glow across hills in the Hypernatural Resort ... 45
Fig 17. White dots indicate user’s preference of environment at a 2017 installation ... 46
Fig 18. The Next Nature Book ... 47
Fig 19. Inside the Next Nature Book ... 48
1 Chapter 1: Introduction
There is a particular disquiet to the lives lived on a planet that is deep in ecological crisis. As the human species looks toward their future, the setting it will inhabit is unclear. Projections of sea level rise, biodiversity loss, global temperature increase, natural disaster prevalence, and resource depletion, among many others, are frightening within the next 10 years- possibly dire within the next 50 (Arboleda, 2016). This pressing moment of ecological uncertainty incites reflection on how humans regard their dynamic environmental entanglements. Despite repeated warnings from scientists about how human behaviors must change if we want to avoid further damage to our environments, most mainstream development discourse continues to neglect issues surrounding our unsustainable relationship to the environments we inhabit (Altamirano, 2016). As long as humans live on Earth and reap its environments, we threaten to place burdens on its ecologies to the point of planetary overload- unless our relationships to our Earthly environments are vigorously reassessed (Pellizzoni, 2015).
At the same time that humans are experiencing changes we have engendered in the environments of Earth, we are spending more and more time in cyberspace. We are simultaneously experiencing the degradation of one space and the expansion of another (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). A few years ago, the smartphone app ‘Pokémon Go’ emerged as an incredibly popular augmented reality (AR) experience. In the game, virtual Pokémon were placed throughout the word, which a user could find by looking through the camera on their smartphone. While these Pokémon were not actually there in the material world, their virtual presence nonetheless sent people in droves to arbitrary locations across their locales. These places were visited without any real consideration of the material destination itself, but rather to find a cyber-object that was randomly correlated to this specific material place. What the success of this game evidences is just how willing people were to conceptually unite cyberspace and material space, and how eager they were to travel the material Earth to the ends of a fully immaterial task. The degree to which users were comfortable moving through a material Earth while wholly disconnected from its materialities is telling (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999).
This game is just one small example of a rapidly growing AR/VR market that continues to draw users in to virtual cyberspace. Apple CEO Tim Cook commented in 2016, “I think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR and VR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of you” (Leswing, 2016). Virtual reality will likely play a massive role in transforming the way humans integrate technology into their daily lived lives. Given this, it is time to start reflecting on how these virtual spaces will exist in relation to the material Earth they are situated within (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999). In these cyberspaces, human action does not necessarily have material repercussions. Instead, terrestrial limits can be exceeded, imaginations can be freed, and humanity can reposition itself unhindered by the material bounds of Earth (Yui, 2017).
Theorist of technology Negroponte writes, “This is just the beginning, the beginning of understanding that cyberspace has no limits, no boundaries” (Negroponte, 1998, p. 9). While cyberspace may be limitless, Earthly space is not. The bodies that carry human consciousness into cyberspace are still planted firmly in a corporeal, material reality, and these bodies are still- at least for the time being- bodies on Earth. Therefore, the transcendent nature of cyberspaces exists in tension with a material Earth on which our behaviors have real, material costs and implications (Altamirano, 2016). Considering our immersion in two simultaneous (and perhaps contradictory) spatial realms, questions about how we understand ourselves within the environments we occupy hold particular poignancy. How people envision their role on Earth is up for consideration- will
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attempts be geared towards nurturing sustainable Earthly environments, or will people instead choose to foster dreams of transcendence, of leaving this planet and its ecological problems behind?
This research project engages these urgent questions by investigating how virtual reality cyberspace may act as an arena in which human-environment relationships are (re)considered. First, a poststructuralist theoretical lens is employed in the treatment of three main concepts: ontologies of nature, human-environment relationships, and virtual reality cyberspace. This theoretical review leads to a short chapter outlining the main research questions of this research project. Following this, I provide an overview of the methodology used to explore two case studies- Nature Treks VR and the Next Nature Habitat. The two subsequent chapters treat the data compiled from each case study separately. An analysis is then conducted of the results from the case studies and comparisons are drawn between the two. The final chapter consists of conclusions about the main research question, and a reflective consideration of what the results may mean for the future.
3 Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework
2.1 Choice of theories
This research project engages three main conceptual spheres: human-environment relationships, ontologies of nature, and virtual reality cyberspace. To approach these concepts and the linkages between them, this theoretical review draws together literature from various poststructuralist schools of thought. Actor-network theory (ANT), posthumanism, and new materialism have emerged as three useful theoretical approaches in this vein. While there are a variety of different theoretical standpoints implicated here, they all share in a poststructuralist project of usurping the reign of conceptual dualisms (Conley, 1996). It is essential that this project is not conceptually limited by dualisms that separate the human from nature, the real from the virtual, the material from the semiotic, etc., as cybernatures are complicated spaces that traverse the blurry lines between these dualisms (Fuchs, 2008). Therefore, employing theory that occupies a similar realm of hybridized fusions is helpful in investigations of these complex spaces (Castree & Macmillan, 2001). Poststructuralist theories all work to make sense of the world free from the imaginative and linguistic bounds of tradition. As this project treats cyberspace as an emerging field of radical possibility for restructuring human-environment relationships, a theoretical exploration that is oriented towards change, fluctuation, interruptions, and disruption is appropriate (Conley, 1996). Virtual natures are understood in this project as arenas where ontologies of nature are enacted and renegotiations of human-environment relationships occur. Each poststructuralist theoretical lens utilized aids this project in unraveling the character and complexity of these occurrences.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is primarily helpful in dissecting the process through which nature is constructed and given meaning in society. It disrupts a dualistic understanding of natural and social worlds by insisting on the interwoven behaviors of myriad actors and actions (Law & Mol, 2001). ANT’s strength lays in this unique ability to recognize multiple congruent nodes of influence that act simultaneously moments of time and space to construct reality (Latour, 1996). ANT can be utilized to illustrate the power mechanisms at play (in material, conceptual, and social conditions) that structure the form and function of virtual cybernatures.
Posthumanist theory has been useful due to its unique ability to enable speculations about the future orientation of humanity, as this project is interested in the way humans envision an inhabitable future environment for themselves (Kroker, 2012). What posthumanism offers is a way to center as the subject of this project the technologically-equipped human to whom material space
and cyberspace are central spaces of being. Engaging a posthumanist perspective allows us to
consider that as the human species changes form, their behaviors of living and dwelling in space change form too (Haraway, 1991). The posthuman subject allows us to investigate how these changes may take shape within human-technological bodies on Earth.
New materialism, which exists underneath the umbrella of both posthumanism and ANT, is primarily utilized here to explore tensions between cyberspace and material space, and to unpack the virtual/real dualism (Barad, 2003). While material and virtual natures may take different forms, they exist in dialogue with each other and thus inform one another. It was important for this project not to treat one ontology of nature as more valid than another- new materialism gave me the tools to treat semiotic, virtual, conceptual, and material natures on an equal plane (Coole & Frost, 2010).
2.2 Ontologies of nature
There is vast ontological multiplicity to nature, varying across cultures, religions, nations, economies, value systems, imaginations, etc. To engage ontologies of nature means to pay certain
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respect to a diversity of realities, meanings, and essences of nature (Kuperus, 2017). Annemarie Mol writes that we must attempt to exceed the limitations of tradition, language, and assumptions in considering different versions of ‘nature’- we should not consider all ‘natures’ as formed from the same building blocks of meaning, but rather as knotty, complex concepts that take diverse forms (Mol, 2017). She argues that each distinct ontology of nature should be thoroughly attended to, and social theorists should not shy away from this task. Mol writes, “It is better to live with gaps, slippages, and frictions; learn from them; keep them alive. Conceptual diversity is not something we should try to eliminate because it is messy” (Mol, 2017, p. 88). Engaging diverse ontologies of nature may provide needed academic insight on environmental problems which call for diverse approaches, remedies, and solutions. Such ontological rumination may empower academics to make strides in a process of disassembling previously held assumptions about ‘nature’ (Pellizoni, 2015). These assumptions are often rooted in human-nature dualisms that accredit human exploitation of the natural world. A certain disassembling of the status-quo treatment of nature is called for in these turbulent ecological times (Conley, 1996). This project requires an engrossed and vibrant reflection on our species and its relation to ‘nature’ in whatever forms it takes. Regarding and respecting multiple ontologies of nature is an integral part of this process.
One pivotal poststructuralist strain of thought is that of ontologies of nature are enacted, or ‘done’ by people’s behaviors in space. Regardless of whether or not these behaviors display a conscious intention or agenda, they nonetheless act upon ‘natures’ to infuse meaning into a ‘nature’ space and enact ontologies (Mol, 1999). Therefore, a multiplicity of enacted natures may exist in one specific ‘nature’ site. This means that the essence of a nature is not confined spatially or by its material properties, but more so by the way that ontologies are practiced and behaved there (Mol, 2017). In this way, a poststructuralist musing on ontologies of nature may lead us to consider the boundless sites where these ‘enacting’ behaviors happen, especially outside the confines of traditionally understood ‘nature’ spaces (Conley, 1996). An illustration- a young girl picks vegetables from the garden in their backyard and draws faces on them. She doesn’t consider these vegetables as plants, but as small lively friends. Her parent, the gardener, gets angry with her for wasting food. As the child sleep that night, her dreams are filled with a cast of vegetable-characters. The next morning, looking out at their garden, the child sees a bustling city filled with stem skyscrapers and leaf cars, a home for her anthropomorphized vegetable friends. For years to come, she thinks of these vegetable friends and their imagined city when she sees any type of garden. As this child travels, grows, interacts with various natures, and reimagines these vegetable characters across a variety of gardens, farms, and grocery store produce sections in the world, this ontology of nature travels with them. This ontological design persists with the same consistency of the more traditional ontology of their parent- the vegetable farmer who cultivated their garden consciously as a space to provide food, and never saw any of their vegetables as having faces at all. While the ontological garden of the parent may be more easily reiterated, understood, and more obviously anchored to a specific material condition, the child’s ontology of the same nature holds the same conceptual weight, works equally to enact a ‘nature’ of the world, and thus equally represents the essence or reality of that garden.
2.2.1 Social natures
The theory of social natures is one approach theorists have taken to understand how different ‘natures’ are enacted by human societies. This theory attempts to unpack the many ways humans have assigned meaning to nature, and how this situates the natural world as intrinsically
5 one with or of the human-social world (Castree, 2001). From the social nature perspective, society
fabricates ideas of nature in response to specific situations, needs, desires, languages, cultures, and discourses (Rose, 2014). Proponents argue that all claims about nature are discursively mediated, using the tools of knowledge and language to make sense of the natural world for humans (Castree, 2001). Theorist Castree writes, “The argument is that nature is defined, delimited, and even physically reconstituted by different societies, often in order to serve specific, and usually dominant, social interests. In other words, the social and the natural are seen to intertwine in ways that make their separation- in either thought or practice- impossible” (Castree, 2001, p. 210). This statement works against human/nature dualisms to a certain extent by highlighting the fusion of the two in enactments of nature. However, Castree neglects to consider the agency of the non-human forces involved in the process, instead attributing most of the ‘doing’ to non-human society.
By mentioning dominant social interests in the above quote, Castree highlights the powerful position of hegemony in determining which ‘natures’ are enacted by societies. One can imagine how the specific social natures of one interest group may support certain enactments of nature and disable others (Pellizzoni, 2015). For instance, a fisher who lives near the ocean is situated in a very different social nature than an aquarium tour-guide who lives in an inland city. The fisher who is neighbors and partners with the ocean may consider it as a source of livelihood, commerce, and sustenance. He may be affected greatly by the winds coming off the ocean, a shift of the tide, a change in water temperature. He may see the ocean as lively, untamed, and animated. In contrast, the aquarium tour-guide who spends her working days in a curated and designed representation of the ocean may consider it a sponsor of fun, beauty, and education. She markets the ocean to paying visitors, she sees the same exhibits on a daily basis from behind glass, and she has never have seen the real ocean herself. The ocean she knows is stable, for-human-use, and theatrical. These two characters’ social natures have arisen out of different circumstances, and are enacted by very different behaviors. The important matter here is that the aquarium tour-guide, who knows a very particular social nature, disseminates information about the ocean to visitors on a daily basis with repetitive and reiterative enactments. Meanwhile, the fisher does not have access to the same platform, and thus their particular ontology of nature is not represented or propagated to the same extent.
Some theorists have considered that social natures should not to be understood as purely human interpretations of nature, but rather as a complex, multi-directional relationships between societies and the lands within which they are embedded (Rose, 2014). These theorists argue that social natures are not just ‘done’ by humanity, but rather are constituted by the simultaneous existence of multiple beings and their respective enacting behaviors (Mol, 1999). In fact, poststructuralists of a posthumanist or new materialist tradition may find that the theory of social natures centers human cognition to a problematic degree. For instance, new materialist Barad writes, “The human does not act on matter, but rather humans and non-humans are agential actors in the world as it continuously comes into being” (Barad, 2003, p. 816). Barad may see the theory of social natures as incorrectly treating humans as the principal operator in constructing natures. For Barad, conditions are always ‘material-discursive’, meaning that discourse and matter come into being together (Barad, 2003). This negates the social nature perspective that human discourse works on an existing nature to assign it meaning. What these poststructuralists do is underscore that reality is co-produced and co-constituted by humans and non-humans alike, disrupting the social nature perspective that humans play an exceptionally formative role in these arrangements (Rose, 2014). The differences between these approaches is evidenced in Jane Bennett’s theory of ‘enchanted materialism’, which ascribes certain inorganic phenomena with an agency that defies
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human will (Bennett, 2010). These phenomena- trash, traffic jams, pesticide resistance, forest fires- all exhibit a certain dynamism that actively shapes the world without regard for human inclinations. In considering the construction of social natures, these phenomena exist wholly outside of the realm of human cognition and discourse, but nonetheless impart meaning on the material ‘natures’ of the world (Bennett, 2010). Therefore, it could be argued from a poststructuralist viewpoint that social natures are just one part of the multitude of ‘natures’ that emerge out of complex human and non-human interactions (Barad, 2003). It may be considered problematic or irrelevant to treat social natures as conceptually distinct, as this opens the door for a resurgence of real/constructed and material/symbolic dualisms.
Castree himself writes that in response to this argument, some theorists have “drawn on actor-network theory to show that societies do not construct nature as they please. Rather, varied ‘social’ and ‘natural’ entities are indissolubly conjoined as ‘hybrids’ in millions of actor-networks organized at multiple geographical scales. In this view, societies are ‘in’ nature (and vice versa) such that it becomes hard to understand who or what is doing the constructing” (Castree & Macmillan, 2001. p. 216). In this way, ANT provides a useful poststructuralist approach in dissecting how exactly the processes of knowing, engaging, and remaking nature take place, by whom, where, when, and why (Rose, 2014).
In considering the construction of both social natures and ontologies of nature, ANT allows one to investigate how a complex arrangement of human and non-human actors shape reality. It insists on seeing each event as the outcome of a convergence of multiple interacting influences, including material and non-material ‘objects’ as actants (Latour, 1996). ANT is a useful tool for investigating just how such ontologies arise- under what conditions, by whom, when, with what tools, and how ontologies are formed. Latour writes, “ANT claims that modern societies cannot be described without recognizing them as having a fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character that is never captured by the notions of levels, layers, territories, spheres, categories, structures, and systems” (Latour, 1996, p. 49). For Latour, ANT is a method of disassembling studies of modern society to reveal its often-overlooked constituent parts and the relationships between them. By providing a new rhetoric of assemblage, ANT unveils a complex process of tying and untying, weaving, lacing, webbing, breaking, and netting of links that form meaningful wholes (Latour, 1996). In short, there is nothing but networks, and in attempts to understand the essence of the world, and of ‘natures’, we must conceptually rebuild it out of such networks.
2.3 Human-environment relationships
Humanity’s relationships to the environments it inhabits has long been considered by a vast variety of disciplines and theorists. Understanding these relationships is a paramount and fundamental part of examining topics concerned with human action on Earth, such as economics, energy infrastructure, futurism, art, medicine, climate change, agriculture, architecture, and so on (Castree & Macmillan, 2001). The aim of this particular research project is to investigate the way human-environment relationships are imagined and depicted within virtual cyberspace (Altamirano, 2016). It is considered here that human-environment relationships take a unique form in VR cyberspace that may complicate, contradict, or reiterate our relationships to the material environments they are modeled after (Levi & Kocher, 1999). In this current moment of ecological turmoil, humans must deeply consider the ways that they are situated in material environments, the ways they practice being-in-space, and overall the ways they inhabit the Earth (Levi & Kocher,
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1999). Poststructuralist theories aid in this project of repositioning the human on Earth through discussions of identity, agency, responsibility, and kinsmanship.
Both ANT and new materialist theorists have inspired fresh debates about human-environment relationships as they reject an anthropocentric lens and instead attribute agency to a breadth of ecological features; the worm, the flow of a river, the bicycle path, the imprint of a fallen rock, and the interactions between them all contribute to a poststructuralist ontology of nature (Bennet, 2010). New Materialists Coole and Frost write, “We return to the most fundamental questions about the nature of matter and the place of embodied humans within a material world; this means attending to the ways we currently produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 5). What is illustrated here is how poststructuralist theory may be employed to approach significant questions about humanity’s future positionality on Earth.
In ‘New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics’ editors Coole and Frost supply a collection of new-materialist ruminations of late. The authors argue for a recognition of agency wherever the ‘dynamism of matter’ emerges in the world- posing an anti-anthropocentric worldview in which the human is radically decentered (Coole & Frost, 2010). They write of human-environment relationships, “Humanity is not external to nature, but now again will reside within it!” actively pushing for a thorough reconvening of humans with their natural environments (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 14). Drawing from ANT, they argue that humanity’s corporeal, material selves and the contexts they are embedded within must be treated as one constitutive whole- working together to form a symbiotic moment of being. In a constant process of reconstituting reality on Earth, material objects are joined in production by immaterial counterparts: language, consciousness, dreams, imaginations, emotions, values, and so on (Coole & Frost, 2010). Coole and Frost attempt to pose matter as having its own direction, motivations, movements, and transformations- thus combatting a view of the material world as inert and to-be-acted-upon by humans. New materialism, they write, “disturbs the conventional sense that agents are exclusively humans who possess the cognitive abilities, intentionality, and freedom to make autonomous decisions and the corollary presumption that humans have the right or ability to master nature” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 19).
Jane Bennett’s previously mentioned theory of ‘enchanted materialism’ takes this further by recommending that non-human matter has a specific quality of liveliness that exhibits agency when in particular formations of the human and the non-human (Bennett, 2010). She names this liveliness ‘thing-power’, the ability of objects to manifest lively agency. “Why advocate the vitality of matter?”, Bennett writes, “Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption” (Bennett, 2010, p. 8). In arguing for this vitality of matter, Bennett works to create new language that can aid humans in respecting the instrumental activity of their material environments.
ANT and new materialism both underscore that simultaneous ways of being- material, semiotic, discursive, etc.- work together in productions of reality. While ANT theorist Latour argues for a strong symmetry and simultaneity of diverse actants, new materialists encourage specific focus on the dynamics between the immaterial and the material, and processes of materialization (Coole & Frost, 2010). New materialism does not achieve the same symmetry of actants that ANT does, evidenced most obviously in the use of the word ‘material’ in its name. Žižek critiques this theoretical turn, arguing that “In their attempt to dismantle traditional modern thinking, new materialisms re-inscribe humanist values by merely extending agency, vitality, and
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social phenomena to non-human material” (Žižek, 2015, p. 13). What Žižek acknowledges in this criticism is that a certain degree of anthropomorphism occurs in the language new materialists’ use to defend non-human agency.
What new materialism does, in its practice, is return to foundational questions about the way humans and their corporeal selves will behave in their material world. It reconsiders the way humans should act upon, consume, build on, destroy, or cultivate their material surroundings, including nature (Sanzo, 2010). Theorist Barad writes, “New ways of thinking about living matter are radically and rapidly reconfiguring our material world- not only transforming our most basic conceptions of life and the human, but also intervening in the very building blocks of life and altering the environment in which the human species- among others- persists” (Barad, 2001, p. 811). Barad sees new materialism as a tool with which one can situate an actor in their material environment, among other bodies, and within specific social and material structures that design a complex and fluid state-of-becoming (Barad, 2001). Likewise, ANT and other poststructuralist projects that challenge the centrality of human agency enact innovative and subversive discussions of how human-environment relationships may need transformation in the future (Conley, 1996). In discussion of human relationships to their environments, these poststructuralist theories provide language with which one can revitalize respect for nature and its material constituents.
2.3.1 Speculative human-environment relations
This section looks at two theorists’ interpretations of two different poststructuralist characters: Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg’ and Bruno Latour’s ‘Terrestrial’. It is important to note that these two theorists’ approaches do not fully represent the breadth of deliberation happening about these two characters, which is constantly evolving and developing through the work of others. While these characters have been investigated by many other theorists, I found these particular two readings congruent to this research’s poststructuralist theory base and thus especially applicable and exciting. These characters are discussed below as a way to imagine the possible human actors involved in enacting human-environment relationships of the future.
In his 2018 book ‘Down to Earth’, Bruno Latour writes, “Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription: learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge” (Latour, 2018, p.7). In order to approach this project, Latour proposes that it is time to stop speaking about humans and start speaking about ‘Terrestrials’. Employing an ANT lens, Terrestrials are considered the multiple agential actants that encompass the reality of being Earthbound. Latour argues that treating human subjects as Terrestrials helps close any conceptual gap between humans and nature by treating all Earth’s constituents as a unified force facing the degradation of their habitat. “Saying ‘we are Earthbound, we are Terrestrials amid Terrestrials’ does not lead to the same politics as saying ‘we are humans in nature’” Latour writes, proposing that employing the term ‘Terrestrials’ allows for a less anthropocentric approach to environmentalism (Latour, 2018, p. 86). By grounding oneself as an Earth-bound being, the Terrestrial accepts a certain stewardship to the Earth and its material natures. Latour’s Terrestrial proposes a new way for humanity to consider itself as part-of or
one-with nature (Latour, 2018). Latour ruminates,
Formerly, it was possible to say that humans were ‘on earth’ or ‘in nature’... one could distinguish between ‘physical’ geography and ‘human’ geography as if it were a matter of two layers, one superimposed upon the other. But how can we say where we are if the place ‘on’ or ‘in’ which we are located begins to react to our
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actions, turns against us, encloses us, dominates us, demands something of us and carries us along in its path? (Latour, 2018, p. 41).
Here, Latour emphasizes the vitality of Earth’s material self. By highlighting the ways in which the Earth behaves with agency in response to human behavior, he re-weaves an ANT narrative of human-environment relationships embedded in a time of rapid ecological degradation. What Latour argues here is that the agency of Earth’s natural systems becomes increasingly obvious as human behavior places pressures on them to which they must react. A Terrestrial identity is needed to make kin between humans and this lively planet (Latour, 2018). Future human-environment relationships may be reimagined as the relationship between all Terrestrials, upending all dualisms and hierarchies that exist in the compound term ‘human-environment’. Claiming Terrestrial identity advocates a symmetry between actants that is foundational to ANT, “The ground, the soil, in this sense, cannot be appropriated when one belongs to it; it belongs to no one” (Latour, 2018, p. 115). By dissolving relationships of domination and subjugation, the human Terrestrial may be emboldened to engage equitable relationships with other non-human Terrestrials in an attempt to sustainably inhabit the Earth.
One may argue that people’s increasing occupation of cyberspaces could exasperate a lack of attachment to our Earthly soil (Mosco, 2004). The Terrestrial character steers us from this world of transcendent ephemerality, and allows us to imagine a humanity that stays grounded with its material kinfolk, even as it immerses itself in virtual spaces of being. Latour asks, “Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit?” (Latour, 2018, p. 103). I am driven to consider natures within cyberspace as arenas where humanity may reimagine itself living within environments that are without grounding or
transcendent from Earth. This insight exposes a possible problematic effect of immersive VR
spaces that lift one up out of Terrestrial realities. Latour may consider this transcendence illusory, irresponsible, self-interested, and short-sighted. He uses this book as a call on humanity to practice a more engaged Terrestrial identity, writing that “Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today” (Latour, 2019, p. 10).
Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ provides another character with which we can reimagine human-environment relationships. Haraway’s posthumanist Cyborg theory proposes a world made up of fusions between the human, the animal, and the machine. She writes, “A Cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Haraway, 1991, p. 179). Due to its characterizing fusions, the Cyborg has a unique relationship to both technology and the environments it lives within. Haraway writes, “The Cyborg would not recognize the garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (Haraway, 1991, p. 185). The Cyborg thus disrupts traditional human constructions of social natures, debunking myths of what nature is or what nature should be. In this way, the Cyborg imagines new ontologies of nature that are liberated from certain dualistic narratives that separate the human and its technologies from their environment. Haraway writes that in theorizing the Cyborg, “Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (Haraway, 1991, p. 180). The human species’ habit of appropriating nature for its own needs cannot continue in the world of Cyborgs who defy traditional definitions of nature. Central to this defiance is an understanding of technology and nature working simpatico to form a congruent whole within the site of the Cyborg (Wolfe, 2010). Technology emerges as the tool with which the Cyborg negotiates between its corporeal and conscious self- as Haraway writes, “Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies” (Haraway, 1991, p. 198). As peoples’
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corporeal selves have been ‘recrafted’ through technology into Cyborgs, their bodies exist as loci of coalesced biologies, technologies, and natures. Therefore, the Cyborg can be seen as an actor of mediation between an ephemeral technocentric culture and a grounded material earth (Kroker, 2012).
Haraway writes, “A Cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities” (Haraway, 1991, p. 151). The Cyborg is the synthesis of mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, the natural and the technological. It can thus be considered a collective self, the result of a co-mingling of distinct actants and different ways of being in the world (Kroker, 2012). Therefore, the Cyborg character offers us a new way to conceptualize humanity on Earth by dissolving dualisms in exchange for unified heterogenous wholes. Haraway imagines ‘sowing worlds’ an important project for the Cyborg- this is a project of collaborative re-fertilization of a dying planet, a project that Haraway argues needs the input of nature, culture and technology equally (Haraway, 2016).
Latour’s Terrestrial could be seen as an approach to this same project, acting as an agent that mediates a symbiotic relationship between all Earthbound beings- fungi and laptops alike. Both of these characters acknowledge that humans are always composite actors, and thus work to make humanity conceptually smaller within relationships of co-existence and comradery. Each character works as a political call to action for humans to rework their relationships to their environs. Considering both Latour’s Terrestrial and Haraway’s Cyborg, we have two distinct creative contemplations on how human-environment relations should be reimagined on a changing material Earth.
2.4 Cyberspace
The choice to center cyberspace as the area of study is threefold; (1) The emerging centrality of cyberspace in daily lived-lives and life-worlds, (2) the transformative and hypermobile capacity of cyberspace to restructure social, cultural, political, institutional, and economic life, and (3) the radical reconfiguration of space-time, spatiality, and relationships between people and place enabled by cyberspace (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). Further, given the constant growth and diversification of cyberspace, it will likely house some of the most significant human developments of the twenty-first century (Fuchs, 2008).
Donna Haraway’s posthumanist Cyborg may live within cyberspace as much as it lives within material space. Therefore, the Cyborg is a useful character in considerations of cyberspace as spaces-of-being that exist in relation to its material counterparts. Cyberspace can be recognized as having unique spatial characteristics that challenge dualisms of real/virtual, natural/technological, and fixed/fluid. Haraway writes that the Cyborg similarly disrupts these dualisms by aiding in the blurring of boundaries between people, their bodies, and the material world (Haraway, 1991). In this way, cyberspace is used by the Cyborg to extend and immerse the corporeal body within technology- enabling new, fluid forms of selfhood (Kroker, 2012). The Cyborg, while associated with virtuality, is also grounded in the living flesh of the human body. It is linked closely with the corporeal experience of space, and thus can be seen as emphasizing the intertwining material/immaterial networked relations that produce a cyberspace (Haraway, 1991). Considering the rapidly changing material reality of natures on earth, it is of interest to see how natures created in cyberspace consider, contradict, or dialogue with material environmental realities.
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The geographic qualities of cyberspace are quite unique, as the material laws of physics and space-time have little meaning in cyberspace. Each of the spaces within cyberspace is highly constructed and representational, as they are always productions of their designers and sometimes users (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). This means that these spaces only exhibit the traditional qualities of material space if they are programed to do so. For example, spaces can be designed without consideration of mass, friction, gravity, permanence, or distance. Authors Kitchin and Dodge state, “There are no ground rules concerning the geography of a virtual environment… any environment, relative to the user or viewer, may be altered at will... all principles of real space may be violated in cyberspace” (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001, p. 16). Here, it is understood that the character of cyberspace depends immensely on the decisions of its designers and users. As these actors are free to break the rules of material space, the product of their environmental design may be unfixed, liquid, fluctuating, or malleable to an extent that is not allowed in material space.
While there are certainly liberating possibilities to this transgression of material spatiality, cyberspace is also spatially constrained by its embeddedness within technology (Fuchs, 2008). For instance, the time and skill it takes to code an entire landscape, the downloading and processing power needed to display complex designs, and the overall limited toolset specific to any software all constrain the possibilities of what can be created and experienced within a cyber environment (Fuchs, 2008). Due to the programmed nature of cyberspace, there are various behaviors, actions, and movements that an avatar is not able to perform. In this way, the individual immersed within cyberspace is subject to a new set of rules that dictate their ability to move through space and interact with landscapes (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). These limitations- distinct from those experienced in material space- may affect the way users conceptualize themselves as spatial beings. Latour’s ANT allows one to look at the agents hidden behind the construction of cyberspaces; from users, programmers, vendors, and funders, to hardware configurations, cultural situations, national policies, wiring formations, environmental realities, and energy sources. By dissecting the arrangements constituting cyberspace, it becomes clear just how central the human actant is in its construction (Phillips, 2003).
Paul Virilio writes how technology is capable of “orchestrating the perpetual shift of appearances”, considering the power of technology to reassemble the perceptive capacity of the human (Virilio, 1997, p. 24). He writes, “As all technologies work as prosthetic devices, simultaneously disabling and enabling the subject, cybernetic extensions of vision inevitably entail the (calculated) loss of other ways of seeing the world” (Virilio, 1997, p. 29). While technology and its cyberspaces may enable new modes of being for the human, they also tie the human to one very particular technology of imagination, visualization, being-in-space, and identity-making. One could imagine how specific technologies inhibit and prohibit certain representations and enactments of nature (Altamirano, 2016).
Some theorists of technology argue that cyberspace enables a certain ephemerality or disembodiment that effectively distances cyberspace users from their corporal selves (Mosco, 2004). When considering the way humans interact with, conceptualize, and navigate material nature in their daily lives, it is important to question how experiencing cybernatures could inform these behaviors. Some argue that within digital landscapes, society is able to envision a future of continuous growth and consumption that is unchallenged by ecological limits (Yui, 2017). Confronted with an unlimited expanse of digital space, humans may imagine themselves free from terrestrial conditions. Žižek speaks of this phenomenon; “The notion of cyberspace- The promise of a false opening, the spiritualist prospect of casting off our ‘ordinary’ bodies, turning into a virtual entity which travels from one virtual space to another” (Žižek, 1997, p. 134). Here, Žižek
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notes the tensions between cyberspace and material space that invoke novel experiences and behaviors in users, and how these experiences are perhaps grounded in an illusory dematerialization or ephemerality. The concept of the Terrestrial may be brought up as a way to bring ‘down to Earth’ the externalities of behavior in cyberspace that may appear or feel transcendent to users (Latour, 2018). In this way, an ANT lens avoids treating cyberspace as a location of the sublime by recognizing its embeddedness within material and Earthly systems (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). This lens may further reveal material impacts to engaging natures in cyberspace, whether behavioral or conceptual. With this in mind, it is of interest to question just how ‘Earthbound’ users of natures in cyberspace see themselves.
2.4.1 Virtual reality (VR) cyberspace
Virtual worlds are a compelling area of study for poststructuralism in the way they disrupt many traditional understandings of reality. Theorist Jones writes, “Virtual reality is the contemporary and future articulation of the philosophical and psychological question of how we define and create reality” (Jones, 2006, p. 126). His position expresses how many scholars see VR as an important emerging area of research. Jones argues that virtual spaces are complex- they are neither purely false representations nor purely futuristic spaces of transcendence, but rather exhibit a balance between the two that he calls ‘virtual realism’. Theorists Stewart and Nicholls concur, writing that “The dichotomy of actual/virtual as well as natural/artificial obscures the fact that a virtual world provides a means by which we can access ‘reality’ and perhaps transform the ‘reality’ in which we presently live” (Stewart & Nicholls, 2002, p. 85). Virtual reality thus plays a role in constructing ideas about ‘nature’, acting as one space in which we attempt to model, enact, and represent its essence.
By focusing on virtual reality cyberspaces, attention can be paid to specific phenomena of embodiment, identity, and spatiality, as VR spaces engage users’ corporeality more so than an on-screen game or forum (Murray, 1999). To what extent a VR experience can immerse the consciousness of a user is brought to question. Further, one may ask how a user’s experience in VR translates to their material lives, if at all. As the corporeal body is embedded in social, economic, and political contexts, it is important to note that the extent to which these contexts are recreated and represented in VR spaces may influence the behavior and experience of users (Murray, 1999). The transferability of users’ experiences within VR to material worlds is of concern to this study. For instance, what it feels like to live within a human body, on Earth, under conditions of climate crises, may be affected by using a VR experience that offers users a new experience of embodiment in nature (Phillips, 2003).
Ray Kurzweil once wrote of the spiritual experience of VR as a “feeling of transcending one’s everyday physical and mortal bounds to sense a deeper reality” (Kurzweil, 1999, p. 19). Such ‘transcendence’ is of paramount importance to this theoretical review, as it implies an ability of VR to facilitate users in ‘leaving Earth behind’. Often highly malleable by the user, virtual reality spaces immerse users in a computer-generated world of their own design. This means that VR has the capacity to represent the imaginations and consciousnesses of users in new ways that may be preferable to less flexible material environments (Phillips, 2003). Theorist Krug comments, “While the virtual tourist is highly immobile, tied to his computer screen, his gaze seems to become not just mobile but hypermobile- the utopian promise of digital technology is the unlimited access of the gaze” (Krug, 2006, p. 258). The ability to imagine new environments, and thus to imagine
being-in new environments, allows the user to project themselves into alternative future worlds
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To what extent a human actor is ‘embodied’ during VR use is debated. Some theorists argue that occupying a VR avatar in an immersive virtual narrative may result in ‘one phenomenal body’ that blends material and virtual identities, embedding the virtual experience into the same corporeal body that experiences the material world (Stewart & Nichols, 2002). “The body, the story goes, remains docked, immobile at the interface, while the mind wanders the pixelled delights of the computer programmers’ creation” (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999, p. 321). Fantastical heroes of the virtual world are imagined along these lines- the disembodied traveler, the astral projectionist, the renegade hacker- characters unhindered by physical constraints and of a radical plasticine mobility (Mosco, 2004). However, some argue that such a disembodiment is pure fallacy, as virtual reality is still accessed through the thoroughly embodied subject who presses an on-switch, types on a keyboard, dons the head-mounted display, and views a virtual world through eyesight (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999). The importance of maintaining a certain belief in embodiment is essential as the corporeal body is located within certain sociocultural, political, economic, technological, and historic contexts that must be taken into account (Featherstone & Burrows, 1995). In her article ‘Will the real body please stand up’ Author Stone writes, “No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS. Even in the age of the technosocial subject, life is lived through bodies” (Stone, 1991, p. 101). This quote brings up the valid point that as long as virtual spaces are accessed through corporeal bodies, the corporeal body will remain essential. Stone believes that no matter how transcendent the capacity of VR, it will never have the ability to replace the corporeal body or render it obsolete (Stone, 1991). While VR partially frees the corporeal body from the experiential constraints of a person’s physical presence in the material world, it does not upset the primacy of these material presences (Barad, 2003).
Other theorists put forth that VR should be considered functioning the same way a cane functions for a blind person- as an object that has become an extension of the realm of senses, as a bodily auxiliary. Murray and Sixsmith write, “In so far as we take technologies into our experiencing by perceiving through them, the technology becomes embodied” (Murray & Sixsmith, 1999, p. 333). From this perspective, VR technology can be seen as a new method of sight incorporated into the posthuman body- the Cyborg may integrate VR as a new way of seeing the world around them. Haraway writes of this fusion of machinery and humanity, “High-tech culture challenges dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes, and who is made, in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind, and what body. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice, we find ourselves to be Cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras” (Haraway, 1991, p. 138). Here, Haraway argues that the blurring of distinctions between machine and human is experienced in our every relation to technology. Fully absorbing technology into our bodies as auxiliaries, prosthetic devices, and lively components, the Earthly human of now practices cybernetic embodiment with every move (Haraway, 1991). Taking this approach, VR headwear machines could be considered as effectively posthuman or Cyborg in their ability to fuse simpatico with the human body. The corporeal self and the lively machine are married through VR cyberspace into one form of cyborg being.
The issue of materiality is of particular importance when considering VR cyberspace. Therefore, VR cyberspace provides an interesting case-study through which to apply new materialism, as it argues for the dissolution of all virtual/real dichotomies. All ‘matter’ in VR -all objects, landscapes, beings- are actually immaterial, as there is no physical permanence or mass to this matter (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). All of this virtual matter is constructed through processes of decision-making, coding, designing, and rendering by the human designer of a particular virtual space (Sanzo, 2018). This means that in VR cyberspace, material is quite obviously imbued with
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meaning from the conscious imaginations of the human. In this way, VR is a space where the meaning assigned to objects becomes more transparent and unobscured, as its full form and function is designed (Heim, 1993). New materialists argue that materialization is a complex, pluralistic process that fully incorporates human’s psychic constructions (Sanzo, 2018). New materialism considers how meaning is transferred between the virtual and material world by acknowledging virtual matter as implicated in processes of materialization. Therefore, virtual ‘material’ allows us to fully recognize how this process occurs through ephemeral phenomena (Barad, 2003). In this way, virtual matter is understood as existing as a construction of both the material, corporeal human and its immaterial, imaginative processes.
. . .
Here, lets imagine that our characters of the fisher, the aquarium tour guide, the girl with vegetable friends, and her gardening parent are all gifted the virtual reality game ‘VRworld’- a representation of Earth filled with user-designed landscapes.
The girl, now a bit older and unsure of what to design, recalls a fond childhood memory and decides to create vegetable characters. She finds that she is actually able to draw faces on every object in the landscape through a feature called ‘personify!’. Even more, she is able to design and build the vegetable city she once envisioned as a child through the program’s many flexible design tools. For her, this virtual experience allows her to recall one ontology of nature that exists within, reengage it, and make it seen. She is finally able to visualize her garden-city filled with vegetable friends and even better, live inside it. She shrinks her avatar down to vegetable size and revels in a world of her own imagination.
Her parent, on the other hand, is losing their eyesight and cannot use the virtual headset at all without feeling dizzy. For them, the virtual experience is inaccessible through their body and thus does not inform, contribute to, or enable exploration of their ontologies.
The aquarium tour-guide locates the ocean on the game map within her first few minutes in ‘VRworld’. She stands at the shore, watches the water slip over her toes, and is exhilarated- her feeling of immersion is intense. She dives into the water, and with a programmed ability to swim, she’s able to explore the ocean with ease. She’s amazed by the perpetual movement of the tides, the feeling of seaweed on her skin, the way the fish loop around her in 3-dimensional space. When she takes of the headset, she feels as though she has finally seen the ocean, and feels like she knows it in an entirely new way. For the tour-guide, the virtual experience has given her a new degree of mobility. She trusts, enjoys, and learns from this experience, incorporating the design of the virtual ocean into her ideas about what the ocean is.
The fisher, out of habit and curiosity, immediately seeks out the virtual ocean like the tour-guide. He finds a quiet spot on the shore and goes to fish. The only available fishing technology in the game is a type of pole he has never used before. After watching an in-game tutorial, he gets accustomed to the fishing pole and starts catching virtual fish that he has never seen before- enormous tuna, sharks, fantastic monkfish. He is momentarily blissful, this is one of the most successful fishing days he’s ever had. But when he exits the game and takes off his headset, he is frustrated with the absence of his catch. All that for nothing, he thinks. For the fisher, this virtual ocean gave him a new experience of being-on the shore- one which was uncomfortable, exciting, and disappointingly immaterial all the same.
15 2.5 Conceptual scheme
The main concepts utilized in this project center around three spheres: virtual cyberspace, ontologies of nature, and human-environment relationships. Poststructuralist theory is centered as the lens through which each of the three spheres can be treated. This schema follows the conceptual division of the research question into sub-questions, where SQ1 concerns ontologies of nature, SQ2 concerns human-environment relationships, and SQ3 concerns cyberspace. It is important to treat each of these three concepts as central components that shape the form and function of virtual natures. When the links between these three spheres are considered, we begin to form a picture of how the human situated within cyberspace may conceptualize ‘nature’ in new and creative ways. Virtual cyberspace links to ontologies of nature by providing a unique spatial arena in which natures are enacted, done, or conceptualized by humans. It is unique in that it is a programmable space accessible largely to humans only (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). In this way, cyberspace exhibits a world where human enactments of nature are done. Theorist Clark writes on this point, “These seemingly real, three-dimensional landscapes filled with plants and trees waving in a digital wind, are but representations that index ideas about what is essentially real in the physical world. Even when an attempt is made to depict components of the (real) natural world with scientific accuracy, these ideas are informed by ideology” (Clark, 2011, p. 84). Here, Clark iterates how the form and function of cybernatures take shape according to its designers’ and users’ perceptions of the world.
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Virtual cyberspace also provides an arena within which human-environment relationships may be reassessed. Virtual cyberspace and human-environment relationships interact in part through the unique experience of being-in-space and embodiment enabled by virtual reality’s ephemeral, dematerialized qualities (Kilteni, 2005). This means that enacting behaviors may take different forms depending on if they occur in material or cyber space. The designed quality of virtual cyberspace also offers interesting insight into the way that humanity envisions and curates certain human-environment relationships (Lange, 2001).
Human-environment relationships and ontologies of nature inform each other as relationships to nature are enacted by humans, social natures are constructed and occupied, and certain ontologies of natures are traversed, represented, and symbolized by human beings (Castree & Macmillan, 2001). Human-nature dualisms emerge as one of the main trends in historical enactments of nature, largely shaping the way humanity imagines its relationship to the environments it inhabits (Conley, 1996). When non-human actants are acknowledged as agential, various ontologies of nature emerge that challenge traditional notions of human relations to their environments.
The Cyborg and the Terrestrial are depicted as offshoots from the human-environment relationship sphere as a way to center the human agent, as much of this research project concerns how humans will inhabit landscapes of the future. The Cyborg and the Terrestrial are represented as two ways of conceptualizing future human-environment relationships.
17 Chapter 3: Research Questions
Research question:
In what ways do the virtual natures within the Next Nature Habitat and Nature Treks provide an explorative arena for human-environment relationships of the future?
Sub-question 1: How are virtual natures constructed and assigned meaning with respect to material natures?
Sub-question 2: How does interacting with virtual nature inform users’ and creators’ perception of human-environment relationships?
Sub-question 3: What features of virtual reality cyberspace enable or constrain particular representations and experiences of nature?
This research question centers virtual natures as an example of how human-environment relationships may be re-imagined through technologies of virtual cyberspace. Virtual reality plays an interesting role in negotiations between the material and the semiotic world as a realm of apparent ephemerality and dematerialization (Heim, 1993). Programmed by human actors, all environments encountered in a virtual space are composed of materials imbued with meaning by their programmers, users, code, hardware, technology, and the many social realities of the world which virtual technology lives within (Jones, 2006). Therefore, virtual natures can be explored as spaces where understandings of nature are conceptualized through a collaboration of their material, emotional, discursive, and semiotic aspects.
The first sub-question attempts to unpack the relationship between users’ conceptualizations of virtual natures and material natures. In doing so, any tensions, contradictions, or inconsistencies between the two types of ‘nature’ may be brought to the surface. The importance of this sub-question is to highlight how particular meanings of nature are constructed in virtual reality, and how these exist in dialogue with meanings constructed about material natures.
The second sub-question explores how experiencing nature in virtual reality effects users’ and creators’ understandings of their material human-environment relationships. By situating the user in a new experience of being-in their body and being-in nature, virtual natures may elicit new conceptualizations of self in relation to environment occupied (Kilteni, 2005). This may have implications for the way users see their corporal bodies interacting with material environments.
The third sub-question investigates how the features of virtual reality cyberspace shape the constructions of nature that occur within it. It is important to this research that the geographic specificities of cyberspace and virtual reality are understood, as certain ways of understanding natures are prohibited or enabled by the medium. Virtual cyberspace as a hypermobile political space of representation must be dissected- how it is accessed, by whom it is designed, through what technology, and for what purpose are questions of interest. Through this process, the features of virtual natures can be understood as products of their embeddedness in social, political, and technological structures (Fuchs, 2008).
18 Chapter 4: Methodology
4.1 Research in cyberspace
I was able to conduct my research at the Network Institute gaming lab at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. In this lab, I was given access to my own computer, an HTC Vive headset, and HTC Vive hand controllers.
There are particular opportunities and challenges in conducting research in cyberspace. As cyberspace has unique geographic characteristics, the way that people behave in space there may take distinct forms (Kitchin & Dodge, 2001). While there are a variety of approaches to researching in this unique landscape, netnography is one prime method researchers have employed with success in cyberspace (Kozinets, 2015). Netnography purports that actors exhibit meaningful and unique behaviors in cyberspace- recognizing the intrinsic exemplary character of being-in-cyberspace. Netnography encourages researchers to study multiple forms of content in cyberspace- textual, audio, graphic, and audio-visual (Büscher, 2016). In this way, netnography allows a researcher to unveil the vast complexities that underlie behavior in cyberspace; the motivations, emotions, and consequences of cyber-actions (Kozinets, 2015). While I employ a variety of methods in this research project, netnography guided me as an underlying approach to the process of treating cyber-content.
4.2 Epistemological position
Foundational to this research project is the premise that ‘nature’ is defined and imagined through social, political, economic, and discursive practices (Mol, 2017). My interest lies in the way meaning-making is practiced in cyberspace, and how certain ontologies of nature are represented through these practices and others are not. In exploring the way ontologies of nature are performed in cyberspace, it is essential that I consider the role I play in recognizing, interpreting, or constructing different natures (Pellizzoni, 2015). My own constructivist epistemological position plays a large role in the way I conceptualize virtual natures, thus it is important to note the ways I have come to know and define both virtual space and ‘nature’. As ‘nature’ is understood here as constantly becoming, my research itself must be recognized as an instance of ‘doing nature’.
From a constructivist perspective, knowledge of the world is filtered through a human lens that is always wholly involved in the construction of meaning (Pellizzoni, 2015). For this research project, this is exemplified in the way that natures are treated: instead of recognizing nature as a knowable, singular, static entity, this research will consider ‘nature’ as existing in many forms, resulting out of behaviors ‘done’ in space by human and non-humans alike (Castree, 2001). By looking at the way ‘nature’ is practiced in cyberspace, this research considers how one form of nature exists in one specific social setting.
4.3 Case-study approach
I chose to take a case study approach to this research project in order to get a sense of how nature was being conceptualized in the virtual reality world. Each virtual reality experience provides some sort of landscape or environment for the user to navigate, which could all be considered ‘natures’ of a sort. This study does not purport to comprehensively overview each of these ‘natures’, but rather chooses two cases which exemplify unique potentialities of VR in purposeful and focused representations of nature. Due to VR’s rapidly advancing technology and accessibility, it seemed to me that what exists in the VR world now does not begin to depict what may exist in a few years. Considering this, I wanted to treat VR as an emerging realm whose scope,
