In several countries, the public’s right to nature is embedded in constitutional provisions. In Vietnam, the same impulse lives on more quietly through cultural practices, such as bringing trees into the house for New Year or adorning landscape scenes. Largely unspoken nostalgia for nature, culturally yet not consciously acknowledged in public discourse, inspires us to frame a practice-led conceptual solution guided by Vogel’s post-naturalist environmental philosophy (2015), which recasts cognitive longing for environmental intimacy as a call to reclaim the lost connection in the human-shaped world. We ask whether digital art can redistribute environmental closeness by translating a remote jungle, in real-time, into a laboratory-based microcosm. Streaming data, such as oxygen level, humidity and volatile organic compounds from the atmospheric sensors installed in the jungle, we convey the sampled air into a sealed Petri-dish ecosystem made from native soil. Under a microscope, the dish becomes a living projection, and its microbial weather conditions respond directly to the forest, giving birth to a primary habitat in the human-made surrounding. Grounded in environmental philosophy and affective ecology, the project combines creative coding, humanities and bio-art. Through interactive design, 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? By treating air as a connective medium, we reframe sustainability as shared respiration, reclaiming access to nature not through coordinated actions, but through a single, breathing, microscopic world.

Authors:
Kok Yoong Lim, RMIT Vietnam, Vietnam
Agnieszka Kiejziewicz, RMIT Vietnam, Vietnam

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Lim Kok Yoong, RMIT Vietnam's associate professor, his research expertise spans media arts, media culture, media philosophy & aesthetics. Central to his inquiry is the embodied and disembodied consciousness in art and technology contexts.
Dr. Agnieszka Kiejziewicz – currently working at Game Design at RMIT Vietnam. She is the author of over fifty peer-reviewed articles about audiovisual art, media art, Asian film, media, culture, digital art, games.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Agnieszka-Kiejziewicz?ev=hdr_xprf

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kok-yoong-lim-30015836/

Connect on ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lim-Yoong-2

Additional website of interest
http://limkokyoong.com

See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule

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