'Beyond the Word': Immersion, Art, and Theory in Environmental and Digital Humanities Prototyping

Abstract

“Beyond the Word” explores the entanglements of Digital and Environmental Humanities (D&EH) with the word and textuality — but also beyond the word and text — with bodies, art, and digital apparati at its center as narrative, speculative, performative, and immersive instruments. Specifically, this article details efforts to incorporate mixmedia immersive literate, sonic, and visual art as a vehicle for teaching critical, speculative D&EH at a time of global ecological and digital transformations. Using two transdisciplinary humanities initiatives developed at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology as test cases, this text focuses on pedagogical prototyping experiments that encourage nondeterministic uses of, and thinking about, digital tools as vehicles for poetry, transmedia environmental storytelling, critical theory, ethics, and immersive archival reimagining. The article covers the design process and sample activities incorporated to transform the multimodal literature and theory classroom into inclusive, immersive commons, and it concludes with a reflection on the ethical ramifications of such D&EH work.