Introduction

Around the world, global warming is intensifying, with 2023 having been the hottest year on record (World Meteorological Organization). Events like droughts, extreme fires, and severe floods articulate an intensifying terrestrial agency which demands recognition of the fact that humans are part of vast enmeshed ecologies that determine our fate as a species – as well as that of any entity on Earth. As philosopher Bruno Latour points out, the interaction of Earth and atmospheric processes (that is, “the terrestrial”) provides the envelope for life on Earth (33–34). They materially and performatively entangle all entities on Earth in complex and co-constitutive ways – positioning humans as subjects with influence and power, yet equally “subjecting” us to their rules of engagement and cumulative impact of interactions –, something many people have lost sight of and feeling for in the lulling embrace of Western consumerism propelled by extractivist economies. In the age of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 17), the deep and cumulative interference with terrestrial processes (especially 250 years of burning fossil fuels) has turned humans into geological agents – affecting and changing the ways in which Earth and atmospheric systems, such as the water cycle or dynamics between gases and particles in the atmosphere, organise and act. The speed and scale by which the terrestrial acts and responds to this recalibrated state of material capacities and relational dynamics has increased. Extreme weather events express this profound terrestrial disruption, where floods and fires flow from climatic processes that converge and erupt immense stores of energy, with far-reaching impacts on all Earth-bound systems (Abram et al. 1; Cunningham, Williamson, and Bowman 1422).

The rapid transformation of our terrestrial lifeworld requires a manifold response and has garnered increased attention across the creative arts and sciences. Its vast distribution and complex articulation challenges representative paradigms across both domains and raises significant aesthetic questions that demand engagement. The article approaches global warming through the lens of Elizabeth Grosz’s feminist theory of geopower in tandem with Latour’s concept of the terrestrial and leverages these concepts for a critical reading of recent theatre and installation work, namely by Manuela Infante and Marcela Salinas, Stefan Kaegi, Simon Burney as well as Marshmallow Laser Feast and Pierre Huyghe. The selection of discussed works is determined by their performative exploration of humanity’s complex ecological relationships that disrupt established aesthetic paradigms by reframing concepts of time, space, and agency – drawing on digital technologies to do so. It speculates how these innovations may be applied to extend artistic paradigms in ways that expand our sensorial and cognitive engagement with the terrestrial’s enveloping nature, shifting from observation of impact to an immersive exploration of dynamic interactive processes. To this end, it explores how the performative strengths of the theatrical medium (such as acting within time, embodied exploration, and affective co-presence) may be leveraged, and – conversely – how the drawbacks identified by theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri (that is, structural privileging of the human) could be offset in application to the field of full-body immersive interactive AI-based 3D visualisation – a context in which I and the team at the University of New South Wales’s iCinema Research Centre have an established track record of theoretical and experimental exploration. Hence, this article investigates how theatrical aesthetics can be applied to the development of new digital creative methodologies to address fundamental challenges posed by the climate emergency.

Global Warming as Aesthetic Challenge

Grosz, Kathryn Yusoff, and Nigel Clark frame humanity’s utilisation of fossil fuels as a capitalisation of “geopower,” the harnessing of “geological, inhuman and preindividuated forces that subtend and provoke organic life” (135). By tapping into “gravitational, magnetic, electrical” Earth processes (132), science has provided manifold means to channel these forces for pragmatic application to augment the amenity of many human lives (Grosz, Chaos 61). However, it has done so often in disregard of their fundamentally volatile, excessive, and eruptive nature, shaping misaligned world views that centre human agency as defined by a capability to stabilise, organise, and control their energetic flows (61). Yet, drawing on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, Grosz points out that the inhuman forces that catalyse life resist permanent arrest and can by definition only ever momentarily be framed and tapped, or – in her terms – “territorialised” (Becoming 27). Conceptualising the cosmos as born from and sustained by dynamic inorganic Earth processes (Grosz, Yusoff, and Clark 132), she inverts established concepts of agency by centring these inhuman forces instead of the human. Organic life (including the human) emerges as a conduit for eternal inhuman becoming that is generated by the principle of difference and is sustained via its innate drive towards intensification (Grosz, Becoming 27).

For Grosz, these forces constitute the primordial “chaos,” discussed across various philosophical schools as the “virtual, [. . .] nature, [. . .] or the cosmos” (Chaos 27), a condition that brings forth a multitude of organic and inorganic entities that stand in counterpointed relations of difference to each other, that is, their properties to varying degrees complement each other and provide conditions under which reciprocal sustenance and development of life can occur. The latter results from a dynamic attuning to milieu (that is, an entity’s immediate unbounded lifeworld) that results in the generation of an excess of properties and qualities. These become available for new couplings that evolve life in an ever-continuing process of differentiation (22). The notion of “excess” is central here, emphasising that life seeks more than survival but strives towards endless proliferation, “to become more than itself” (4).

This is supported by the principle of “allure” that acts on the senses of living organisms, enticing them to seek out properties that exceed the merely useful and known. Allure is aesthetically catalysed by the introduction of frames, delineations of territory that create ever-increasing relations of difference – because this elaboration of alternatives provides the basis for sensorial experiences of properties as appealing or repelling. A framed territory delimits milieus by restricting, shifting, and reorganising fragments of entities and decoupling properties and qualities from their original functional context, imbuing them with their own resonance, expressiveness, and dimensionality, which “enables new functions to erupt and new forces to regroup” (47–48). A territory constitutes “a provisional stability” (70) that introduces one form of order into the primordial chaos, so that life may dynamically proliferate under the provocation that the frame imposes. A territory is a precondition for sentient life but can only ever be provisional, because any frame loses its productive power of differentiation over time, setting in motion a process of converse deterritorialisation through which waning sensation can be reinvigorated and new forms of emergence be explored (13).

Read through the lens of Grosz’s theory, global warming signifies such a process of deterritorialisation, if not of the entire terrestrial system, so at least a disintegration of the frame that humanity has applied in order to harness and exploit geopower in the form of fossil fuel processing and consumption. This frame has aesthetically conditioned the way we perceive, affectively relate to, and materially shape geopower. It has enabled the ways in which humans have been performing within (or rather “against”) terrestrial systems. By positioning the amenities supplied by carbon-intensive lifestyles as most alluring, application of this frame has catalysed the consequential degradation of our natural lifeworlds. This, in turn, has propelled a shift and reorganisation of terrestrial processes through which geopower seeks out new ways of proliferation, which are starting to disrupt our carbon-fuelled civilisation. The changes afoot are reshaping planetary realities faster than scientists have anticipated – as weather patterns disintegrate, heat waves and droughts abound in formerly temperate regions, whereas arid zones receive above average annual rainfall within just twenty-four hours, such as happened in the Dubai flooding in April 2024 (Schewe et al. 9; Rannard). Latour metaphorically likens this dynamic augmentation of the terrestrial to a theatre that formerly supplied a stable spatial frame to the human play of worlding, but now has awoken and competes “with the actors for the principal role” (35).

As I will show in my discussion of recent theatre and installation art, performance itself can be harnessed as a form of “material thinking” (Infante and Aloi 132–133) to increase our understanding of this transformational shift in Earth processes and to explore its implications. In this deterritorialising phase, the terms, trajectories, and consequences of action are continually morphing in ways we are currently ill-equipped to appraise – taking scientific modelling to its outer limits, but equally imploding the aesthetic framings that have supplied the scaffolding and toolkit for engagement with the terrestrial in the past. With transformations accelerating, established ontological frameworks – that is, “theories of being” (Grosz, Becoming 41) and “ecological contracts” that supplied guidance on how to symbiotically integrate with specific ecologies for a viable existence, such as exemplified in First Nations’ observation of co-occurring processes on country (Rose 295) – are losing pertinence and are replaced by a deepening uncertainty vis-à-vis our relationship with terrestrial agency. To inhabit a warming globe, we need to identify and engage with the terrestrial’s morphing material performance and rehearse how we may fundamentally aesthetically reframe our engagement with it to ensure survival. We need to reshape our concept of agency away from the individualised notion of human intentionality and control towards expansive dynamic entangled interaction with inhuman forces and develop new aesthetics that sensorially allow us to engage these, so they become at least provisionally “livable,” that is, experientially salient (Grosz, Chaos 77).

Aesthetics are foundational to such endeavours as they calibrate the frames through which we can sense and perceive entities, which subsequently prefigure and guide any cognitive and material engagement (Baumgarten 78). They frame chaos into new territory and produce differential qualities that can be leveraged as “the materials and formal structures of art” (Grosz, Chaos 16). In Groszian terms, art is defined as an excessive, productive aesthetic system that exclusively enables us to actively tap into the cosmos’ unbounded inhuman forces, to engage their vitality through new tentative aesthetic framings that trigger fresh sensations and actions. It can equally enact a movement of “deterritorialisation,”

of cutting through territories, breaking up systems of enclosure and performance, traversing territory in order to retouch chaos, enabling something mad, asystematic, something of the chaotic outside to reassert and restore itself in and through the body, through works and events that impact the body. (Chaos 18)

It is a conduit for intensifying life, for augmenting differences, so they can emerge, invigorate, and transform matter – be it organic or inorganic. The concept of sensation is central to Grosz’s ontology. It describes a qualitatively new differentiation, a “vibration” that results from emerging differences. It exists neither fully within a subject nor an object, instead denoting a life force that proliferates in the liminal space between them – the space that opens through their interaction and performative relation to one another (Grosz, Becoming 190–191). At its best, art can generate ever new unique sensations and materialisations, a capability unmatched by any other human pursuit. By adding expressiveness to matter through extraction of selected qualities, these can resonate in new ways. They can attain an autonomy that makes them available to new couplings, catalysing an intensification in the cosmos’ nonlinear performative “becoming.” Grosz’s concept of art here runs counter to definitions that centre representation or human self-expression as primary objectives of artistic production (Chaos 10). Instead, she locates its purpose in the transformative intensification of life that is achieved through aesthetic experimentation, that is, modes of dissolving existing and framing new territory, to bring our bodily nervous systems into new material relations to the vast web of entities that make up the cosmos. As such, art can open pathways to restructure our relationship with ourselves and the terrestrial that we are part of; it can productively intervene into the ways we sense, perceive, and act in dynamic exchange with other entities. Aesthetic experimentation can generate new sensations and actions that have the power to incrementally frame energetic flows even beyond the human and our existing practices of worlding, towards more expansive concepts of temporal and spatial becoming.

Art forms that reframe territory through spatialisation, such as performing and installation art, are particularly compelling because they communicate multisensorially and involve a whole-of-body approach that maximises potential for new sensations to emerge. By immersing the physical bodies of performers and visitors within carefully arranged environments, auditory, visual, and kinaesthetic senses are simultaneously activated, offering an expanded symphony of inputs to the perceiving subject that increase the number of relations of difference that may emerge as a result. These play out in space and over time, meaning that they can acquire a qualitative multidimensionality that invites sustained and deep engagement. Yet, concurrently, the focus on the sensing human body as a conduit for exploring our enmeshed connection to wider ecologies easily runs the risk of unduly centralising the human, counteracting the very concept of horizontal interconnectivity which reframes the human as but one element among many that constitute terrestrial agency.

Therefore, theatre and installation art require an aesthetics that strongly expresses a nonhuman agency to offset and decentre the embodied perspective, so that it intensifies our lateral integration with the cosmos and foregrounds the fluid dynamics of its becoming that envelope yet also far exceed our species. The digital commends itself as an aesthetic tool in this regard because its key characteristics – infinite malleability and procedural execution of code networks – provide powerful means to estrange (and hence, deterritorialise) our perception through augmentation of physical spaces that can be experienced as provoked yet not controlled by our interaction. As such, it can open a space in which agency can be reframed and tested as a property of emergent relationships.

The following section explores recent aesthetic approaches across theatre and installation art in terms of their potential to produce new sensations and perceptions vis-à-vis humanity’s relationship with the terrestrial. The subsequent section then speculates how these may be upscaled for a disruption, that is, deterritorialisation of existing artistic paradigms that thus far have tended to prioritise questions of representation and intersubjective persuasion over sensorial engagement and embodiment.

Reframing Terrestrial Agency: Contemporary Theatre and Installation Art

Timothy Morton and Chaudhuri identify and grapple with the challenges that global warming is presenting to human understanding. Morton introduced the concept of the hyperobject, denoting an entity so “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1) that its entirety eludes our critical faculties. It can only present itself to our senses through local manifestations. But these can never speak to their actual scale and impact. In short: hyperobjects like global warming – or Earth and atmospheric systems, that is, the terrestrial as an articulation of geopower – resist meaningful human engagement (Schneider and Nocke 12) because neither our modes of framing nor our available expressive strategies can appropriately apprehend them. Scholars like Latour and Chaudhuri have outlined the particular challenges that the terrestrial poses to available representative paradigms. They identify theatrical performance as a potent albeit constrained medium to explore our enmeshed relationships. This is because it leverages fundamental dimensions of human sensing to immerse audiences and performers in spatialised worlds that have the capacity to reframe how we experience and conceive our relationship to the terrestrial beyond the perimeters of everyday experience. Nonetheless, its structurally pervasive humanist lens as well as the fourth wall, the divide between evoked worlds and the audience, especially in Western performance paradigms, stand in the way of unlocking potential to generate new productive concepts of our relationship with the inhuman forces that articulate through global warming.

Chaudhuri explores how theatre may address such resistance, how this medium’s deeply human-centred aesthetics may be reformulated to speak to the terrestrial’s multi-agent fabric. Having pioneered ecocritical performance frameworks and practices, she has proposed the concept of a “fifth wall dramaturgy,” that is, “strategies that will align the theatrical apparatus – its conventions, protocols, and possibilities – with the altered conceptual frameworks offered [. . .] by climate change” (“The Fifth Wall”). These most prominently extend to the ways we conceive time, space, and human agency to embody an expanded concept of ecology that understands “the human [. . .] beyond psychological subjecthood and sociopolitical agency” (Chaudhuri, “Anthropo-Scenes” 12), not as exceptional but as a performer within a lateral web of interrelated cosmological entities. Theatre’s task here becomes one of “speculative world-building” (Chaudhuri, “Dis-Anthropocentric” 42) to “relocate the human not only in relation to landscapes and species – as the old ecology did – but also to geologic times scales [sic] and geophysical forces” (“Anthropo-Scenes” 20).

Her arguments align with Grosz’s flat ontology, weaving the concept of diaphanous human and nonhuman bodies into a politically engaged call for a fundamental recalibration of theatrical aesthetics. In her Climate Lens Playbook, Chaudhuri proposes strategies to advance such aesthetic reformulation. Proceeding from the ethics to “Include everything” (“Ethic” 138) – as opposed to centring the human –, she advocates for a flexible mode of creative thinking premised on scientific fact, which nevertheless remains open to the oscillating play of territorialisation and its perpetual dissolution and becoming anew. Rather than focussing on well-formed narrative, she calls for evoking time and worlds in their nonlinear state of becoming, to capture their “pleated geographies” in which the vast global pervades the infinitesimal local, and the present forever carries the past and future folded within it (“Dis-Anthropocentric” 42).

The following section adopts the concept of a fifth wall dramaturgy as analytical lens to investigate recent theatre and installation artwork in light of its capability to expand understandings of human-terrestrial relationships. It opens with a focus on Infante and Salinas’s Estado Vegetal (2017), expanding the discussion through highlighting complementary strategies evident in Kaegi’s Temple du Présent (2021, for Rimini Protokoll) and Burney’s The Encounter (2015, for Complicité). It then draws parallels to the field of installation art, canvassing work by Marshmallow Laser Feast and Huyghe, which prepares the ground for a proposition of new aesthetic avenues to be explored in the following part.

Infante and Salinas’s speculative play Estado Vegetal can be read as an exploration of Chaudhuri’s propositions, while illuminating Grosz’s concept of art as productive aesthetic practice that deterritorialises anthropocentric concepts of agency by bringing into view and valorising how plants frame and inhabit territory differently to humans. It premiered at NAVE – Teatro a Mil Foundation in Santiago de Chile and has since extensively toured across the USA, Asia, and Europe, including the 2019 Venice Biennale. The work probes the synchronous yet radically different ways of inhabiting time and space between humans and plants, through a branching and circular dramaturgy that sees the solo performer jumping between and interweaving multiple storylines into an intricate narrative tapestry that mirrors the properties and principles by which plants intensify life (that is, multiplicity and recursiveness). In doing so, it allows audiences to affectively explore an alternative mode of being, unsettling anthropocentric assumptions about the exclusivity or primacy of human aesthetic practice through a deterritorialising framing of agency.

The story at the heart of the play sees a firefighter-turned-arsonist escaping a blaze on his motorbike, getting caught in a blackout as a tree’s shoots overgrow a powerline, causing him to crash into its trunk, which places him into the headline comatose “vegetative state.” As his distraught mother seeks accountability for his fate through the courts (with the plant world identified as potential defendant), the play inflects and counterpoints her advocacy with a poetic ecocritical contemplation on the related yet divergent properties of human and plant sensoria that condition their modes of inhabiting space and time, that is, of framing territory. With time decoded as a function of movement through space, humans and plants are placed on a cosmological spectrum that connects through degrees of velocity and lateral expansion (Sandilands and Gibson 87): the mother’s lament centres the inability of her son to move across space, arresting time and suspending human life in liminality. His acquired sessility is paralleled with that of plants, whose vitality – on the other hand – is never in question, demonstrated in the tree’s culpability of incrementally expanding “in place” until its humanly imperceptible movement has sufficiently deterritorialised our shared milieu, collapsing established frames and suspending human life in the process, executing a movement that humans cannot perceive but that nevertheless erases the arsonist’s capability to inhabit time by traversing space.

In the play, plants model an alternative concept of inhabiting space and of understanding life beyond the confines of the human perspective. Their lateral, multidirectionally branching bodies defy unified concepts of identity and instead offer modularity and recursiveness as structuring principles that give rise to a powerful, life-affirming networked agency. Estado Vegetal’s dramaturgy mirrors this concept, weaving its narrative through looping and gradual progression that adds layer upon layer to individual storylines that eventually connect into an expressive semantic web. While Salinas solo-performs the show, she ventriloquises multiple roles, generating a “plurivocal monologue” (Cotter 40) that collectivises her body, with a looping pedal adding density and dissolving temporal progression via digital technology. This device allows evoking a dynamically multiplying presence that auditorily crowds Salinas’s physical body on stage, dissolving the boundaries of the discrete human subject and announcing the emergence of an expanded subjectivity structured by the vegetal principle of distributed collectivity. Sound and the infinite recombinatory capability of the digital here conjure a sensorial experience of the human as reformulated along vegetal lines, probing our potential to inhabit the world differently through attuning our sensorium to traces of “plant-ness” within our own bodily capabilities (Infante and Aloi 132–133).

Infante describes this theatrical practice as a form of “material thinking,” a form of “speculation” (132–133) that draws on philosophical concepts developed in New Materialism and Critical Plant Studies to come to terms with difference and Otherness that leaves room for the unknown and mysterious which elides formal knowledge but must be approached through embodied sensing. Her practice aims at generating an “affective journey” (128) for the audience that enables new sensations to emerge. It is noteworthy that her approach does not explicitly target representative strategies – limiting vegetal visual references to a number of plastic pot plants grouped around the minimalist set – and deriving most affective power through Salinas’s physical performance as well as evocative, digitally sampled sound and lighting design. The latter, for example, deploys spotlights to slowly guide the performer along the stage’s perimeter – mimicking the principle of phototropy that sees plants physically responding to stimulation by light, for instance, sunflowers tracing the sun’s daily orbit (Cotter 41). This aesthetics results in the storytelling heavily relying on impressing the audiences’ sensorium, letting concepts advanced through the spoken word strongly resonate through embodied channels, subtly augmenting audiences’ perception that lend credence to the proposition that human bodies can be framed in ways that explore a shared milieu with other organic lifeforms.

Infante and Salinas’s practice here connects with other compelling experimental performance work that aesthetically probes alternative framings of humanity’s relation to terrestrial agency. For example, it shares with Kaegi’s durational Temple du Présent an interest in aesthetically investigating modes of physical communication that can expand our notions of sentience and agency beyond the limiting confines of anthropocentric framing. Instating a live octopus in an aquarium on stage as protagonist by letting its responses to a human performer’s external stimuli (such as light, sound, touch, spatial manipulation) dictate the evolution of the work’s dramaturgy, Temple du Présent interactively moulds human behaviour to that of the animal, offering compelling avenues for reconsidering basic assumptions about communication and intelligence.

Correspondingly, Burney’s The Encounter aesthetically augments sensorial perception of time and space via intricate, spatialised sound design to query the constitution of consciousness as a property of the human mind – instead inviting audiences via headphones to enter into altered states of perception that allow for an imaginative “feeling into” the pervasiveness of terrestrial forces that produces a sensation of consciousness emerging not from singular bodies but from the relationships between entities – human and otherwise. The role of technology in these works is to facilitate an augmentation of the senses, supplying a tool to achieve surprising modes of vivid immersion, from within which new sensations may emerge that set audiences up for reframing concepts of self and their relationship to the cosmos. The Encounter takes aim at the fourth wall of theatrical storytelling, using spatialised audio and the immediacy afforded by headphones to facilitate an intimate experience that directly impresses on the audiences’ senses, provoking a heightened state of alertness to environmental cues geared to permeate the conceptual and sensorial barrier between auditorium and the world represented on stage.

Marshmallow Laser Feast’s immersive interactive exhibition Works of Nature (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2024) pursues a related approach, deploying towering LED screens to explore cosmological patterns of material existence that tie the human body into a web of perpetual inhuman becoming. Using the metaphor of breath as a connecting thread across the exhibition’s eight distinct works which visually explore properties shared by human cells, forests, and galaxies, the installations also invite visitors via audio prompts to meditatively align their own breathing with the pulsating imagery and soundscape, aesthetically attuning their bodily responses to the rhythms of the displayed cosmos. Large LED screens and a reflective floor coating fully envelope visitors, and dynamic visuals elicit a kinaesthetic effect that augments viewers’ everyday perception by overwhelming and fusing parameters of sensorial discernment. Coupled with an evocative pervasive soundscape, this multisensorial interfacing of technology with the body achieves a qualitative co-constitution of the viewer with the digital that conventional keyboard-mouse-screen set-ups cannot match in their reliance solely on the visual. The installations immerse visitors within a continually morphing image space in which the recognisable coordinates of familiar objects (such as water droplets, lung tissue, or close-up images of leaves) are dissolving into fluid point-cloud animations that reconstitute and evolve as higher-order entities (that is, the image of a lung may fluidly transform into that of an analogously shaped forest canopy, or zooming into a water droplet may reveal a hidden galaxy).

Here, the digital’s infinite scalability, malleability, and variability are leveraged to meditate on cosmological patterns that otherwise remain hidden from the human eye, yet that fundamentally underpin the concept of terrestrial agency. Articulating some imagery to visitor interaction underscores the conceptual link drawn between the physical body and the terrestrial, as well as the interstellar ecologies canvassed on screen, subtly integrating the visitors’ presence and agency into the evolution of the artwork. While those interactive pathways in Works of Nature are pre-programmed and can only be activated and followed by a visitor – rather than generated in real time and open-endedly evolved –, they still offer a compelling means to sensorially break the fourth wall in order to shrink the viewers’ affective distance to the viewed and to make room for new sensations. Here, co-presence of viewers and dynamically responding visuals produce an affective dialogical relation that can be spatially explored over time, integrating performative concepts into the installation design that serve to deepen immersion in the terrestrial realm. Used in this way, room-scale motion-tracked interactive visualisation environments can break the fourth wall, placing audiences directly into a world that senses and responds to their embodied presence, turning passive onlookers into involved participants. They let the visitor become an active agent in the visual cosmos, without overdetermining its evolution, resonating with approaches developed by visual artists like Huyghe, who experimentally explores complex and dynamically emerging ecologies by incorporating only traces of human presence into his installation designs.

Huyghe does so in ways that emphasise that an installation’s visual elaboration is evidently governed by agencies other than human (for instance, by coding), allegorically resonating with Grosz’s concept of inhuman forces. For example, his latest exhibition Liminal (Punta Della Dogana, 2024) incorporates sensing and AI methods to capture and process visitor data, feeding this into generative video software that creates an abstracted “memory” of the encounter with the human, sampled into disjunct film sequences displayed across various surfaces in the dim-lit exhibition space. The estranging effect of these faintly recognisable image fragments that oscillate among cryptic material assemblages of organic and inorganic matter – which, in turn, display varying degrees of dynamic transformation – reframes anthropocentric assumptions about perception and teleological evolution, counterpointing the visitors’ perspective with an eerie enigmatic agency that sensorially displaces the human as primary origin of transformative affect within a posthuman ecology that seems no longer primarily shaped by our species’ influence. As such, the work evokes speculative worlds in which the human is superseded, deterritorialised to a degree that only remnants of our physicality and lifeworlds shine through as segmented and reassembled into emergent new forms of being that only bear passing semblance to embodied life as we know it.

The power of these digitally driven deterritorialising approaches to creative exploration of the nexus between human and inhuman agency resides in their ability to aesthetically augment sensory perception and to open new pathways for experiencing our interconnection with other entities to reframe how we see, understand, and act in the world. Digital technology here allows to segment, multiply, and reassemble sensory cues that can provide audiences with a simulation of complex human and terrestrial systems and their governing dynamics (Castells 5). While work like Huyghe’s amplifies the affective qualities of nonhuman agencies vis-à-vis human interaction, the potential for their full-scale exploration by digital means has been significantly expanding with the proliferation of generative AI applications. These create capability for evolving dialogue not unilaterally controlled by human agency, affording new qualities of performative engagement that can be leveraged for probing the complexities of our relationship to the cosmos.

Proposition for an Expanded Terrestrial Aesthetics

While the previous chapter highlighted the compelling capabilities of digital technologies to reframe our relationship with the terrestrial by augmenting sensorial perception, the following transposes these insights into a proposition for a new aesthetics grounded in the work I have pursued at the University of New South Wales’s iCinema Research Centre – a research centre in Sydney dedicated to the exploration of the creative capabilities of AI in application to interactive immersive 3D visualisation. It brings together scholars, artists, and scientists to explore new interdisciplinary trajectories that leverage concepts of performance, embodied interaction, co-presence, and evolutionary dialogical narrative to elucidate the interconnected dimensions of the terrestrial. Our work is underpinned by the proposition that – in the context of amplifying fluidity of global developments – the creative arts cannot rely on representational practice alone but have to innovate in ways that allow engaging the constantly shape-shifting nature of our worlds and foster new forms of inhabiting these rapidly morphing grounds.

The digital – and with it, Machine Learning (ML) and AI – in application to full-body immersive visualisation thereby serves as our sandpit for such exploration since its malleability and constantly expanding capabilities provide compelling means to simulate, augment, scale, or estrange our everyday experience of terrestrial ecologies. It provides the means to combine approaches from multiple art forms (such as theatre and installation art) and produces new types of autonomously reasoning agents who can challenge and accentuate our own embodied capabilities, entanglements, and limitations as well as their ongoing transformation in increasingly pervasive mixed-reality environments. The digital can amplify aspects that remain hidden in everyday perception and experience and open them up to interactive exploration. It can offer compelling experiences of our intricate enmeshment with the terrestrial and open manifold creative avenues for leveraging aesthetics in a Groszian sense as a conduit for tapping into the productive force of sensation to explore and reframe our relationships with other agencies (Grosz, Chaos 61) as a way to more fully understand the rapid transformations galvanised by global warming.

As argued above, many artists already leverage digital technologies to compelling aesthetic effect, elucidating our complex relationship with the terrestrial by exploring strategies that sensorially alert and reposition audiences to other agencies. The digital’s infinite malleability here can act as a potent source of creative speculation; yet, since virtual worlds are not circumscribed by the laws of physics as our physical bodies are, scenarios can easily veer off into the fantastical, with less potency to elucidate real-world interdependencies. Such tendency shines through, for example, in the visually arresting work of the teamLab collective that probes leading-edge capabilities of large-scale interactive creative visualisation by delivering room-scale full-body immersive environments that dissolve representations of the terrestrial into a “borderless continuity” (teamLab) of morphing animations that playfully respond to visitor interaction. An example of such work is Forest of Proliferating Immense Life (2023), which spawns seasonal flower bloom across cinematic-scale screens, tracing the lifecycle of a colourful sea of flowers in time-lapse that wither and disintegrate at the visitors’ touch and are gradually superseded by newly budding plants. While the conceptual framework underpinning teamLab’s work can be read through the lens of Grosz’s concept of geopower, its absolute embrace of fluidity transports viewers most often into spaces no longer subject to the laws of physics and hence conjure “un-livable” fantastical realms that reframe territory in ways that decouple from the physical world that we inhabit with our bodies.

iCinema’s work seeks to maintain such anchoring while nevertheless exploiting the creative capabilities afforded by the digital to augment insight into and interaction with the dynamics of terrestrial agency. It does so by leveraging comprehensive real-world data on Earth and atmospheric processes (supplied by agencies like Australia’s CSIRO and USA’s NASA) and using bespoke ML techniques to segment and convert it into formats that can be read by visualisation software in real time, a precondition for its utilisation as baseline in creative applications. At present, the iCinema team is refining these approaches in the iFire ARC Laureate project, which develops an AI-based wildfire 3D visualisation system under the leadership of research artist Dennis Del Favero. They have established the capability to assimilate a diverse range of terrestrial data on historical and scientifically modelled extreme fire events and to convert this into interactive immersive hyper-realistic cinematic 3D scenarios. These use SPARK and WRF-SFIRE mathematical fire simulations that are converted into filmic episodes using the Unreal software.

ML techniques are thereby being developed in two ways: firstly, to facilitate the fire itself to behave unexpectedly using a fusion model trained on SPARK fire data that enables the visualisation of a range of possible fire behaviours outside those anticipated. Secondly, to identify and extrapolate patterns in this fire data, and – on the basis of this as well as scientific fire models – to generate plausible (future) extreme fire scenarios that take into account the compounding and cascading effects of warming climates on terrestrial processes. Users will be able to select variables – such as temperature, humidity, wind speed, and direction – and observe their effects on fire behaviour in real time, in a life-size cinematic encounter with an extreme fireground in 3D immersive theatres including ones that are 360 degrees and 135 degrees (measuring 3.5m in height with a diameter of 10 m and 6 m respectively). At present, the team has generated three environments that users can explore: a mountainous forest landscape, a pine plantation, and a grassland setting – in which changes in variables translate into very different forms of fire behaviour. iFire here envelops viewers within the underpinning processes and unfolding dynamics of an amplified terrestrial agency and translates these into embodied sensory experiences. This provides the ability to move away from a concept of art that centres on harmonic balance between humans and “nature,” towards an exploration of asymmetrical human-terrestrial relationships and their attendant turbulent instability.

As such, it departs from the still dominant aesthetic and narrative approaches of contemporary theatre and installation artwork that frame global warming through the lens of human expectations, rather than probing the logics of our interaction with climate processes that sweep us into an uncertain future. Hence, these approaches privilege human agency, obscure the agency of ecospheric forces, and consequently do not grapple with the dimensions and scope of terrestrial agency nor probe our complex relationship with it. As argued elsewhere (Thurow, Grehan, and Pagnucco), most current creative work engages with the real or imagined impacts of climate extremes as heat, fire, and water reshape the familiar features of our built environments. They offer a mostly observational perspective in that they do not engage with our interaction with these events, that is, with what is driving intensifying terrestrial articulation and how this responds to – or overrides – human interaction.

Instead, most contemporary stage work, such as David Finnigan’s Scenes from the Climate Era (Belvoir Street Theatre, 2023), develops human characters who audiences can identify with precisely because they are modelled on our present constitution and belief systems – unprepared as we are for meeting, responding to, and being reshaped by terrestrial forces. Much artistic practice takes stock of the devastation wreaked by extreme weather events with an intent to raise awareness of the challenges that lie ahead as we inch closer to breaching the critical 1.5°C warming threshold, jumping from delineation of impact to advocacy for action; yet without dedicating any focus to the dynamics that unfold in the extreme events themselves.

An example is Uta Kögelsberger’s evocative installation project Cull (since 2020) that, in visually arresting form, documents the charred remnants of California’s ancient sequoia forests decimated by wildfires in tandem with an incredibly successful multipronged activist agenda targeting reforestation and ongoing protection. While it galvanises much needed action aimed at recovery, approaches such as these still fall short of providing a window into the unfolding realities that will – at least for the foreseeable future – shape our lifeworlds. For they do not delve into the embodied, sensory dimensions of our enmeshment with terrestrial systems and do not elucidate the dynamics and logics that play out in the nexus between our and broader terrestrial agency. The terrestrial does not emerge as reframed, as an inherently dynamic embodied autonomous agency that can be engaged with to explore our capability of performing with it rather than against it.

It is my aim to leverage the capabilities of the iFire application to investigate ways of addressing this gap in current aesthetic research by experimentally exploring its potential to translate the dynamics underpinning extreme fire and our interaction with it into sensorially salient embodied experiences that creatively examine our active relationship with terrestrial agencies. Its AI/ML capabilities would be key to grappling with the challenge that Chaudhuri identifies in her concept of the fifth wall of anthropocentrism in creative practice, namely that imposing human sensemaking strategies onto nonhuman contexts can blind us to essential dimensions of their agency and our interaction with them. While at present, the iFire system can translate user-requested changes in fire variables into plausibly evolving new fire scenarios, I am interested in testing ways of expanding its capability to elucidate performative human-terrestrial co-constitution.

To deepen iFire’s capabilities in this regard, I will focus on the nonhuman logic framework that undergirds fire propagation and seek to develop a dramaturgical framework inspired by the dependencies and patterns emergent in iFire’s data outputs, as well as from the insights delivered by the fire science that underpin these. The logic of particular chemical and physical fire propagation processes could be translated into a dramaturgy that affords capability to explore interaction with an agency that follows different patterns and rules of engagement to human intentional, value-driven decision-making. For example, fire requires a set of conditions that need to be fulfilled for it to take hold (that is, flammable material, oxygen, heat), with heat intensity determining velocity of molecular movement, leading to cascading transformations of materials and their behaviours once certain thresholds are met, with particles embarking on diverging, expanding or constricting, trajectories that – once they interfere with each other or external influences – can trigger turbulence, which opens uncertain branching possibilities of denouement or unpredictable escalation that can entrain or reverberate into larger spatial contexts.

It is my aim to facilitate the reflection of these processes in an interactive immersive visualisation application that builds on the iFire system and to explore an aesthetics that enmeshes users within this fire ecology as active yet not omnipotent agents, to elucidate the uncertain dynamics of violent pyroconvective processes and to provide a sense of performance as an integrated part of these forces. One strategy to achieve this could be to use haptics that determine a user’s body heat and to upscale this data as a trigger for fire activity (that is, turn the user into one of the essential conditions for setting off a fire) in the visualisation. Motion tracking could be used to affect the intensity of molecular responses, that is, of flaming and entrainment; with ML calculating and triggering reverberating effects into the fiery landscape and adding interference by simulating competing pyroconvective processes. The autonomy displayed by the AI in augmenting user input would be central here to allow for a sensation of evolving dialogical progression that counteracts and emancipates from the aesthetic dominance of human agency and to open a window into engaging with the inhuman forces that dynamically constitute the emerging new climate regime.

Conclusion

This article has explored emerging aesthetic approaches across recent theatre and installation art in light of their potential to reframe our everyday experience of terrestrial relations with a view to enable new understandings of global warming and the scope and nature of our agency in times of transforming climates. Surveying digitally augmented approaches to embodied and immersive storytelling, the discussion provided insight into emerging aesthetic approaches, demonstrating how multisensorial strategies may be leveraged to enable a deeper appreciation of our relationship with the terrestrial. The digital and ML here introduce a powerful capability to reframe modes of everyday perception (be it through spatial and/or temporal manipulation) and, thereby, to heighten the potential for new sensations that can affect a shift in how we experience the inhuman forces that articulate our agency with and through the terrestrial.

Advocating for a shift from observation and lament of extreme event impact towards an immersive exploration of our enmeshed constitution and dynamic interaction with terrestrial agency, it has speculated how the theatrical medium’s aesthetic strengths (acting within time, embodied performance, and affective co-presence) may be leveraged, and – conversely – how its drawbacks (privileging of the human) could be offset in application to full-body immersive interactive AI-based 3D visualisation. The aim is to allow viewers to become aware of and feel the boundaries of human agency and to explore our role as agents within a web of multiple interconnected agencies that enable as well as circumscribe our sphere of influence. This has potential to instruct engagements with fundamental difference and to provide a deeper understanding of our co-constitution as terrestrial, calling for a reformulation of our concept of human agency in times of global warming that lets us glean the profound impact of our species’ cumulative actions, yet is also beginning to highlight the very severe consequences and limits of our spheres of action, choice, and influence.