Digital Nature Revisited: A Ten-Year Synthesis of Art, Technology, and the Evolution of "Nature": Reimagining Post-Truth Ecologies Through Art, Algorithm, and Animism

TL;DR

This paper critically re-examines the concept of 'Digital Nature' over the past decade, exploring its evolution across art, technology, and cultural perspectives, and proposing a multi-axis framework to understand its diverse interpretations.

Contribution

It offers a genealogical and philosophical survey of 'Digital Nature,' introduces a novel multi-axis framework, and discusses future directions involving AI and ethical considerations.

Findings

Digital Nature has evolved across media art, bio-art, and indigenous worldviews.

A multi-axis framework helps clarify diverse interpretations of Digital Nature.

Future developments may involve large language models and address ethical pitfalls.

Abstract

This paper critically re-examines "Digital Nature," a concept that has proliferated across various domains over the last ten years. By "Digital Nature," we refer to an evolving view of nature as a dynamic process of circulating computation and matter, one that extends into the realms of AI, XR, indigenous perspectives, and post-human theory. Despite its popularity, "Digital Nature" remains ambiguously defined. This paper provides a genealogical and philosophical survey of how the idea has emerged, diverged, and overlapped in media art, bio-art, and generative art, alongside relevant Eastern, Islamic, and indigenous worldviews. We then introduce a multi-axis framework (from real/virtual to anthropocentric/object-oriented, with sub-axes of enchantment and materialization), illustrating how digital technologies have reconceptualized the question "What is nature?" in unexpected ways. Finally, we discuss how the field might evolve, particularly through the lens of large language models, AGI, and "supernatural reality," while highlighting the ethical and political pitfalls of techno-occultism. Our ultimate goal is to re-situate "Digital Nature" as both an intellectual frontier and a collaborative platform that invites continuous dialogue between art, science, technology, and cultural philosophies.