Digital Aestheticization of Fragile Environments

It can readily be observed simply by looking around or listening attentively in any natural setting, that people’s engagements with their surroundings are different from a decade ago. Today, in the mountains, by the seaside, and in the forests, it is hard to find anyone who is not tapping on their smartphones, flying drones, using wearable cameras or other gadgets to digitally “capture”, and augment, their experiences of the environment. The objective of DigiFREN is to study this transformative moment of environmental perceptions in Europe. The historically and ethnographically grounded research will elucidate digital aestheticization in/of fragile environments, namely, how are digital media and technology implicated in reframing environmental perceptions, affections, conceptions, and practices. Five places in Slovenia, Croatia, Finland, Norway and Poland, strongly impacted, or seen to be threated, by human activity, have been carefully selected to reflect the cultural and ecological diversity of Europe. Although particularly important in the era of “overheating” (Eriksen 2016), digital aestheticization of fragile environments remains ethnographically relatively understudied. In the humanities, it has primarily been debated in art theory, (new) media studies and philosophy. Furthering these debates, DigiFREN will approach digital aestheticization as it unfolds in everyday life. DigiFREN is the first ethnographic project to undertake a large-scale, comparative study of the topic in a digitalising Europe. It expands established methodological strategies and introduces the experimental method of senso-digital walking. DigiFREN is uniquely designed to study the shifting and increasingly important relationships between the changing categories of the human, environmental and technological. Thus, it will produce important results relevant to not only anthropology, history, cultural and sensory studies, but also to human geography, environmental aesthetics and media studies.

By focusing on the digital aestheticization of fragile environments both in and in-between particular European locales, we fill a gap in the socio-cultural understanding of digitalization, its significance for our everyday lives, and its implications for our dealings with environmental change. Such an approach will yield results crucial both for academia and the general public. Theoretically, DigiFREN will significantly contribute to the study of the digital aestheticization of the environment by situating the process and its consequences within the everyday context of outdoor leisure. So far, no theoretical perspective explicitly tackles the digital aestheticization of the environment as an analytical anthropological object at diverse spatial and temporal scales. Drawing on the fields of the history of technology, digital, sensory, and environmental anthropology, as well as science and technology studies, DigiFREN will engender fresh insights into cultural transformations in a (post-)digitalizing Europe and significantly enhance our knowledge of the multiple ways in which fragile environments are constructed, represented, and experientially and practically encountered. Methodologically, DigiFREN fruitfully employs and integrates established methodological strategies while introducing new, innovative procedures developed specifically for and through the ethnographic study of digitalization processes, notably the experimental method of senso-digital walking. If successful, the development of this new method could influence research beyond the study of the five selected European locales, with great potential for future transdisciplinary studies of digitalization and human-environmental relationships everywhere.

DigiFREN will significantly contribute to Slovenia’s development by researching the digital aestheticization of fragile environments, which is crucial for understanding contemporary changes in how nature is perceived and how humans relate to their surroundings. The project will provide new insights into the impact of digital technologies on environmental perception, which is particularly relevant for tourist-heavy areas such as Solčavsko and Bohinj. The research results will benefit both the academic community and the broader public, including stakeholders in sustainable tourism, nature conservation, and policy-making for managing sensitive landscapes. The development of innovative methods, such as senso-digital walking, will enable advanced approaches to studying digitalization in Slovenia and support sustainable development and the digital transformation of cultural and natural assets. DigiFREN will thus contribute to Slovenia’s strategic development as a country that recognizes the importance of digital technologies in shaping its environmental and cultural future.