Mission
In 1974, Thomas Nagel asked: what is it like to be a bat? His answer — that we cannot know — names a limit that biologist Jakob von Uexküll had already theorised: the Umwelt, the species-specific sensory bubble within which every organism perceives only its relevant slice of reality. We see 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum. The platypus navigates by electrical field. The silk moth reads a single pheromone molecule from kilometres away. The living world is saturated with perceptual dimensions simply closed to us.
Philosopher Baptiste Morizot calls this the root of the ecological crisis — a crisis of sensibility. We treat other-than-human life as backdrop and resource because we cannot sense it as presence. The ecological crisis is, at its core, a perceptual one.
As a species, we evolved to perceive threats that are immediate, local, visible, caused by an identifiable agent, and threatening to ourselves. These are the conditions under which fear, care, and response were adaptive. Ecological crises share none of these properties. They are slow, planetary, diffuse, and threatening to a non-human world most people will never directly encounter. The perceptual apparatus that served us well for most of human history was not built for this. That is not a moral failing. It is a description of a mismatch between the world we evolved in and the one we now inhabit.
The Umwelt is a boundary, not a wall. We accept Nagel's impossibility and propose the attempt anyway. The question is not whether we can dissolve the boundary but how far we can press against it and what we discover in the attempt.
This is where immersive experience enters: not as illustration or spectacle, but as a research instrument. IX is specifically suited to this task because it addresses the body, not just the mind. It produces embodied knowledge, felt before it is understood. When experience is multisensory, interactive, and spatially enveloping, it activates the affective and neurological registers that must be re-trained.
What IX can produce is affective translation: a designed encounter that renders non-human perceptual realities in terms the human body can register. Not as accurate reproduction, but as felt approximation, building the ecological empathy required to inspire action. The goal is not to replicate the bat's world, but to make a human audience feel the fact that such a world exists.
"How can we design experiences that make non-human worlds perceptible?"