From empathy machine to mimetic sympoiesis: Reimagining virtual reality toward regenerative media

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used to enhance environmental empathy through perspective-taking, allowing users to virtually inhabit the bodies of animals and plants and simulate nonhuman suffering. But this approach can reinforce anthropocentric and colonial logics by assimilating alterity and reducing ethical complexity to empathetic identification. This article moves beyond empathy as the dominant framework for environmental VR and proposes mimetic sympoiesis as an alternative. It reconceives VR as a regenerative form of mediation that foregrounds mimesis not as replication but as a technē of collaborative worldmaking: a participatory and cosmotechnical process through which users become-with others rather than feeling-as them. Drawing on affect theory, posthumanism, and decolonial media studies, I analyze multispecies and Indigenous VR projects to illustrate how immersive technologies can regenerate ways of sensing, attuning, and responding to the more-than-human world. Rather than substituting experience for action, mimetic sympoiesis reimagines the ethical and environmental potential of VR from an empathy machine to a regenerative media that rehearses embodied futures at the intersection of technology, nature, and worldview. Contemporary VR and immersive technologies emerge as mimetic media ecologies that, while haunted by the binary between virtual and real, retain the potential for cultivating more-than-human ethics of partial encounter and decolonial cosmotechnics.

Introduction

The use of virtual reality (VR) to elicit empathy has emerged as part of a recent wave of pro-social VR discourse promoted by tech developers, filmmakers, academics, and the popular media (Bloom, 2017a; Bollmer, 2017; Foxman et al., 2021). Championed as a bridge between immersive presence and moral responsibility, empathy anchors the promise of VR to connect users with distant suffering. As filmmaker and entrepreneur Chris Milk famously claimed in a TED talk, ‘virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world. . . through this machine we become more compassionate, we become more empathetic, and we become more connected. And ultimately, we become more human’ (2015). His words helped ignite a surge of enthusiasm for immersive media in humanitarian and multispecies storytelling, from simulating the experiences of Syrian refugees, Black Americans, the homeless, and the elderly to those of endangered gorillas, marine animals, and a warming planet. Central to this vision is VR as a technology of empathy, the presumed human capacity to understand shared emotions with another’s experience. After all, people are more likely to care when they feel into the perspective of another, whether human or nonhuman.

In an era of climate change, empathy has come to seem like a promising answer to counter apathy and technological alienation. There have been various attempts to create environmental VR narratives that enable users not only to witness damaged ecosystems but also to feel nonhuman suffering by virtually embodying their experiences. Many such narratives populate the idea that perspective-taking and inhabiting another’s body in immersive virtual environments can uniquely enhance empathy (Bailenson, 2018; Herrera et al., 2018). However, the VR ‘empathy machine’ discourse has been widely disputed. Critics express concerns over an ethics of alterity and caution against VR empathy reinscribing hierarchical, egocentric, and colonial attitudes by presuming seamless access to another’s experience (Bollmer, 2017; Nakamura, 2020; Silverstone, 2003). When it comes to environmental storytelling, VR perspective-taking that purports to simulate nonhuman umwelt, or what biologist Jakob von Uexküll terms an organism’s perceptual way of being in the world, might reinforce anthropomorphic projection by attempting to translate the untranslatable rather than truly acknowledging nonhuman otherness. Nevertheless, these debates do not render immersive media devoid of ethical and environmental potential. They foreground a need for alternative frameworks that move beyond modern human-centric understandings of affect and mimesis in VR storytelling. Instead of simulating ‘being’ and ‘feeling as’ an animal, a tree, or a refugee, can VR storytelling encourage an affective and embodied ethics of alterity, opacity, and interspecies coexistence without the urge to erase difference or possess another’s experience?

Building on these debates, this article rethinks VR’s ethical and environmental potential by shifting from empathy machine to mimetic sympoiesis. I turn to mimesis as an overlooked conceptual link between technology, nature, and media. VR operates as a mimetic medium that extends beyond representation by immersing users in regenerated virtual surroundings that provoke affective and sensory interactivity and exchange between a user’s worldview and technological mediation. When understood as an ambivalent and performative practice in which subjects and worlds are co-constituted in iterative acts of resemblance, repetition, and transformation, mimesis highlights reciprocal and porous relationships between self and other, human and nature, and artifice and the real (Benjamin, 1933; Derrida, 1975; Wulf C and Gebauer G, 2014). By traversing the boundary between representation and becoming, mimesis reframes immersive virtual environments as specific, affective encounters rather than universal, fixed simulations. In place of seeking a perfect simulation of reality, I propose that we ask how VR contributes to mimetic sympoiesis, which positions media as a participatory and speculative interface through which meaning emerges via mimetic acts of play and the user becomes-with the virtual in a cyborgian sense. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis, or ‘making-with’ and ‘worlding-with’ (2016: 58), my sympoietic framework reimagines VR as a cosmotechnical assemblage of collaborative worldmaking that explores how immersive media practices might facilitate interdependence without flattening incommensurability and impart knowledge without reducing nonhuman subjectivity to human moral sentiment.

This article further contends that a mimetic reorientation of VR corresponds to a shift in environmental thought from sustainability to regeneration. Regenerative thinking emphasizes a transition away from a sustainable focus on efficiency, damage reduction, or preservation toward participatory and holistic worldviews in which humans restore and co-evolve with living systems (Gibbons, 2020; Reed, 2007; Warden, 2021). While conventional sustainability still relies on a mechanistic, reductionistic worldview that sees humans and the rest of life as separate, with natural resources in service of human consumption (Gibbons, 2020: 2), regeneration reorients ‘from “doing things TO nature” to one of participation as partners WITH and AS nature’ (Reed, 2007: 677). By realigning human efforts with life’s principles, regenerative thinking takes us beyond the utopian/dystopian binary to ask how technology can help cultivate conditions for more-than-human flourishing. Extending regenerative thinking to media studies, I suggest that planetary crises call upon regenerative media, or media as a material-discursive practice that invites users into embodied, iterative, and sympoietic processes of making-with the Earth. VR’s ethical potential lies not in simulating empathy or inhabiting another’s subjectivity through technology, but in reshaping affects and environmental imaginations through situated storytelling, thus re-embedding humans as co-creators in the communicative web of life.

The article proceeds in three sections. The first examines the rise of VR empathy within environmental storytelling, focusing on the affordances and limitations of empathy in VR perspective-taking. The second interrogates universalist and modern framings of empathy and moral virtue upheld by VR practitioners. It engages with affect theory and critical posthumanism to develop a decentered, relational, and more-than-human understanding of affect in media. The third section introduces mimetic sympoiesis as an alternative for reimagining VR as a form of regenerative media. I turn to case studies of recent Indigenous and multispecies VR projects to illustrate how immersive VR storytelling might resist the techno-hype of modern media to become a decolonial and futuristic technology of participatory worldmaking and multispecies coexistence.

Embodying the nonhuman: Empathy and its discontents in green VR

In recent years, VR perspective-taking has emerged as a powerful medium for environmental storytelling. A growing number of projects across creative industries and universities have mobilized immersive simulations that allow users to embody nonhumans, adopt their point of view, and feel more empathetic. In Project SHELL, a collaborative VR conservation initiative between the University of Oregon and Snapchat, participants inhabit the avatar body of a Loggerhead sea turtle navigating threats including plastic debris, boat strikes, and climate change as they progress from hatchling to nesting adult (2020). At Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), Jeremy Bailenson and his team have conducted a series of VR experiments ranging from simulating homelessness to ocean acidification. In one experiment designed to raise awareness of animal suffering and reduce meat consumption, participants ‘become’ a cow through motion tracking and avatar alignment: drinking from a virtual trough, eating virtual hay, feeling simulated cattle prods, and ultimately being herded into a virtual slaughterhouse (Bailenson, 2018: 104). These projects exemplify a growing green VR movement, with scientists, filmmakers, media organizations, and companies employing immersive technologies to motivate environmental behavior change. Beyond academic institutions, environmental NGOs including Conservation International, WWF, and Greenpeace have also begun leveraging VR to raise public awareness about wildlife conservation, climate education, and microplastic pollution.

Bailenson’s projects appear frequently in discussions about VR perspective-taking and empathy. He posits that taking the first-person perspective in immersive media increases empathy by decreasing the gap between self and other, ‘such that one’s thoughts concerning the other become more “selflike”’ (2018: 82). According to him, VR offers two key advantages for perspective-taking over traditional narrative media: first, its immersive quality reduces the cognitive burden of constructing a mental model of the empathetic subject's perspective, thereby helping a user overcome the motivational hurdle to engage in empathy; and second, role-playing within a controlled simulation can counteract negative stereotypes and implicit biases (2018: 83). When users see their digital avatars in VR, a kind of virtual mirror is created, enabling ‘body transfer’, a process through which users ‘take ownership of bodies that are not their own. . . The mirror is the ultimate tool to allow someone to become someone else, to walk in his shoes’ (Bailenson, 2018: 87). Tactile user-avatar alignment through multisensory simulation is considered one of VR’s unique experiential affordances, believed to induce a ‘holistic Proteus effect, through which an individual adopts alleged perceptual, cognitive and behaviour tendencies of the virtual body they embody’ (Raz, 2022: 1464). This surge of interest in perspective-taking amplifies a belief in academic and popular media presses that presence, immersion, and embodiment are VR’s technological affordances to elicit empathy ‘by creating experiences that are psychologically real, technologically smooth, and experientially meaningful’ (Foxman et al., 2021: 2169).

Empirical research adds credibility to the empathetic effects of VR perspective-taking. Questionnaires from VHIL’s Become a Cow experiment show that ‘those who became a cow gained more empathy for the plight of cattle’ by viscerally feeling the animal’s suffering and sacrifice (Bailenson, 2018: 105). This result echoes other experiments by psychologists and digital media scholars who have found that VR perspective-taking, such as embodying a cow in a pasture being bred for its meat or coral reef in an acidifying ocean, can heighten awareness of environmental and climate change, create feelings of connectedness with nature, and promote ‘a sense of nature as a part of people’s self-identity’ (Ahn et al., 2016: 400). Longitudinal research from Stanford VHIL compared the effects of a VR perspective-taking task and a traditional narrative-based task on attitudes toward the homeless, with results indicating that VR perspective-taking amplified empathy and led significantly more participants to sign a petition supporting affordable housing (Herrera et al., 2018: 16). This body of research suggests that perspective-taking in VR builds empathy and virtuous feelings that can translate into changes in environmental attitudes and pro-social behaviors.

Despite empirical findings, VR empathy has met sustained criticism. Some scholars contend that VR narratives such as humanitarian films strategically use empathy and scripts of suffering and hope to assuage the audience’s moral guilt while obscuring geopolitical causes of crises (Gruenewald and Witteborn, 2020). Focusing on the spectacle of suffering, liberal humanist empathetic VR narratives tend to pathologize people of color, the homeless, the elderly, the disabled, and nonhuman species as bodies of damage. Lisa Nakamura problematizes virtuous VR as a techno-utopian solution engineered to produce the ‘right’ kind of feelings, suggesting that Big Tech deploys empathetic VR as a cultural alibi to distract and manage their complicity in exacerbating class inequality, privacy breach, and far-right racism and sexism (2020: 48). By enabling privileged users to temporarily and recreationally inhabit racialized, gendered, and animal avatars, she argues, empathetic VR peddles ‘identity tourism for the 21st century’ (2020: 54), automates the labor of feeling on behalf of another (60), and valorizes digitized emotion over material redress (61). Her critique echoes that of Bollmer, who cautions that VR empathy confuses affective intensity with ethical insight. While seemingly progressive, such confusion risks aesthetic assimilation, whereby the desire to ‘know’ or feel as another is actually ‘a negative annihilation of the Other as their otherness becomes nothing beyond what can be absorbed and experienced by oneself’ (2017: 72). Arguing for a radical compassion based on acknowledgement of difference and distance, Bollmer insists that ‘it is not in “understanding” the other fully through which I come to care for them, but through acknowledging the limits and the infinite inability to grasp another’s experience completely’ (2017: 74).

Extending these debates to environmental storytelling where research about VR and AR (augmented reality) remain limited, Karen Bakker highlights a blind spot that discussions of empathy in immersive technologies tend to privilege the emotional experiences of human users over the nonhumans they seek to simulate (2024: 161). Even if this changes in the future, there could also be risks of a VR or AR system misinterpreting animals' emotions for humans. That is to say, even environmental VR narratives can reproduce anthropocentric hierarchies by framing nonhuman subjectivity through self-referential human experience. Bakker warns that technologically mediated experiences may risk producing in users a preference for digital simulacra over living ecologies (2024: 163). Yet, she remains hopeful that VR storytelling, although imperfect and never a substitute for real nature, holds environmental potential for reducing tourist carbon footprint, promoting nature education, enrolling citizen scientists, and rekindling biophilic wonder (2024: 170-72).

On the whole, these discussions reveal persistent tensions around VR empathy, particularly the slippages between immersion and knowledge and between empathy and ethics. These concerns about the possessive and colonial tendency of empathy are not new but have historical antecedents. They echo earlier debates in aesthetic and media theory on the ethics of alterity and spectatorship. Derived from the Greek empatheia (from em- ‘in’ + pathos ‘feeling’), empathy is an English translation of the German term Einfühlung, or ‘feeling into’, which originally described the act of solitary viewers emotionally and somatically immersing themselves into another body or object, whether an artwork, a sculpture, or a natural form. As a mode of spectatorship, Einfühlung enables an anthropomorphic merger of spectator and object. As Juliet Koss explains,

Placing the perceiving eye within the viewer’s body, Einfühlung described a range of relations between this body and the work of art, including a tendency to anthropomorphize and a notion of projection we might now associate with Sigmund Freud. The viewer, Vischer wrote, ‘unconsciously projects its own bodily form—and with this also the soul—into the form of the object. From this I derived the notion that I call “Einfühlung.”’ Pity, sympathy, and compassion all appeared within the discourse, and they were not always (or consistently) differentiated. (2006: 140)

By destabilizing subject-object boundaries while remaining anchored in the viewer’s bodily projection, Einfühlung ‘articulated a loss of self that simultaneously reinforced a powerful, physical sense of selfhood’ (Koss, 2006: 140). It thus operates as a paradox of aesthetic self-estrangement and self-intensification. With the rise of modern visual abstraction and the communal experience of cinema, this intensely individualistic spectatorship became increasingly mediated and reconfigured by the shared visual field of the screen. As Koss contextualizes it, the resurgence of empathy across the humanities and media theory can be read as a cultural response to ‘the oppositional aesthetics of recent decades—a distancing from the rigorous intellectualism of poststructuralist discourse and the allegiances of identity politics’ (2006: 139). The contemporary return to empathy in immersive media once again puts Einfühlung’s projective tendency under scrutiny, with VR’s technological setup providing new conditions for immersion. Comparing the VR headset to earlier peep devices and IMAX theatres, Jenna Ng argues that VR’s sense of immersion works by ‘forgetting’ screen boundaries through a convergence of confinement (restricting a viewer’s visual field) and engulfment (surrounding with a 360° view), producing a totalized media environment in which the spectator would almost always experience ‘being an or in an Other, such as another person or in another place’ (2021: 115). In the affective labelling of VR as post-screen hence renews the paradox of Einfühlung, raising ethical questions about whether embodied perspective-taking risks turning another’s suffering into immersive experiences consumed as empathy.

In this genealogy, empathy has long been associated with modern aesthetic individualism as a form of possessive identification, or what we might call ‘feeling-as-if’ that centers the perceiving self. A modern sense of empathy resurfaces in many contemporary environmental VR experiences. By feeling as if one were actual turtles and caged cows, VR perspective-taking promotes empathetic immediacy as a celebrated pathway to environmental and prosocial virtue. But as Thomas Nagel reminds us in his essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’, the subjective, perpetual, and sensory experiences of a bat is not reducible to objective facts in human language and will remain mysterious despite our imaginations to make sense of it (1974). Many scholars have highlighted that increased empathy in immersive media experiences is often a transient phenomenon, unless users move from an emotional response to rational compassion (Bakker, 2024; Bloom, 2017b). The distinction between empathy and compassion becomes salient when relating to nonhuman beings like corals, insects, or fish whose ways of sensing and suffering elude the human empathetic identifier of facial expression. In other words, cultivating a distributed and reflective ethics of compassion can facilitate ethical commitment without full knowledge and help us live alongside beings with whom we share no common language.

Even as many perspective-taking VR projects promise to raise environmental awareness, they must acknowledge the gaps in knowledge and the limits of empathetic understanding. These include the risks of: (1) anthropomorphic projection (translating an animal’s or nonhuman's perspective into human knowledge); (2) aesthetic abstraction (representing nonhuman life as a spectacular and known object for consumption); and (3) moral individualism (reinforcing the user’s moral centrality through subjective feelings for distant suffering bodies). These concerns do not negate empathy, but they expose its limits and ambiguity to compel deeper inquiries as to whether and how immersive media can cultivate distributed, situated, and multispecies modes of affectivity that challenge human exceptionalism.

Decentering empathy: From individual morality to more-than-human affect

Affect as it has been discussed in the humanities over the last few decades have variously moved beyond the modern projection of subjective feelings to engage relational understandings that explore how affect moves across bodies. Scholars have discussed how emotions are not private psychological matters but porous forces that infiltrate, circulate, and transform individuals and communities, bodily feelings and social spaces, and political imaginaries and collective action (Ahmed, 2004). As Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell write in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader 2, ‘Affectus concerns how forces or intensities rise and fall over the course of action undertaken by a body/bodies—focusing on relationality and process as continuous lines of variation, always in the midst of ongoingness’ (2023: 6). Understanding affect as relational and processual leads us to the immanence of all things to affect and be affected. This onto-affective understanding invites us to a concept of empathy that shifts from individual moral sentiment to a material agency mediating between the animacy of bodies. We see and feel not because we are autonomous individuals but because we are part of the cosmos and others.

An example of relational understanding of affect is Jane Bennett’s non-modern notion of ‘material sympathy’ at work in Walt Whitman’s poetry, which reconfigures sympathy not as self-possessed selves bearing moral sentiments but a mimetic tendency among bodies and a vital or more-than-human natural force that draws bodies together (2016: 607). Bennett reads Whitmanian sympathy as an affectivity that infuses porous and infectious bodies including humans, places, things, species, elements, and atmospheres. This material sympathy moves beyond a privatizing ‘dynamic of “identification” between two or more (aspirationally) sovereign individuals’ toward articulating ‘a trans-individual model of receptivity, affectivity, and sociality’ (Bennett, 2016: 616). Put differently, material sympathy undermines discrete individualism to reveal an affective ecology of receptivity and responsiveness that acknowledges the more-than-human affinities of our being.

Bennett’s notion of material sympathy helps to move beyond individualized affect, but many VR empathy advocates remain tethered to a modern Western model of moral individualism. Environmental psychologists have shown that humans find it easier to empathize with single individuals than suffering masses or statistical representations, an effect often known as ‘compassion fade’ or ‘psychic numbing’ (Slovic and Slovic, 2015: 10). The dominance of the ‘story of one’ approach poses a challenge for environmentalism given that, as Bakker aptly reminds us, most environmental crises involve large numbers of anonymous creatures instead of charismatic megafauna (2024: 95). The limits of empathy thus reveal a wider struggle in environmental storytelling to connect individual feelings with systemic transformation. In this context, the challenge for VR environmental narratives is not simply whether they can simulate nonhuman suffering, but whether they can unsettle modern individualism to embed emotions within affective ecologies and cosmocultural worldviews that shape affect as collective, distributed, and more-than-human.

Affect theory is crucial not only for identifying the shared emotions and anxieties that move through environmental issues, but also for finding common ground across species boundaries because climate and social justice activism requires altruistic emotions as a foundation for action (Bladow and Ladino, 2018: 3). Against the normative idea that empathy must be evoked through individualized suffering, what is needed in response might not be more emotional intensity, but a key ingredient in empathy: ‘social affiliation, or a feeling of belonging’ (Bakker, 2024: 174). By cultivating a distributed affectivity and more-than-human belonging, a feeling of kinship that extends beyond human categories of recognition and community, immersive virtual environments may shift our attention from individual suffering to a multispecies conviviality through which nonhumans are encountered not as passive victims but also subjects, kin, and joyful beings with personhood and spirituality in ways practised in many Indigenous and non-Western ecological traditions.

Many VR perspective-taking developers continue to frame empathy through moral individualism that instrumentalizes ‘empathy as skill’ (Foxman et al., 2021: 2176). In doing so, they risk reproducing a homogenous discourse of empathy as a universal capacity to acquire the feelings and subjectivities of others, an assumption that could flatten otherness and displace the reciprocal nature of ecological entanglement. To fully grasp this non-reciprocal empathy as VR goes mainstream, I suggest we revisit Jean Baudrillard’s critique of modern mass media as systems of speech without response, or intransitive technologies that simulate communication but foreclose genuine social relations. In ‘Requiem for the Media’, he argues,

The social process is thus thrown out of equilibrium, whereas repaying disrupts this power relationship and institutes (or reinstitutes), on the basis of an antagonistic reciprocity, the circuit of symbolic exchange. The same goes for the media: they speak, or something is spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere. This is why the only revolution in this domain—indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court—lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media. (1972: 281)

It is not hard to discern speech without response in VR perspective-taking. What passes for participation, like inhabiting a sea turtle or cow avatar, is less an interspecies exchange than a simulation that resuscitates moralized images of humans as saviors of nature. For Baudrillard, communication must be understood as more than transmission and reception of coded messages or scientific objectivity; instead, revolutionary media practices must facilitate symbolic and social exchange, through which local, transgressive, and spontaneous interactions can breach the media system’s totalizing control by restoring ‘reciprocity and antagonism of interlocutors, and the ambivalence of their exchange’ (1972: 285). Genuine communication, he insists, emerges only from the deconstruction of media as systems of non-response, where even the very concept of medium itself must disappear to make space for social interlocutors to confront and respond to one another (1972: 284). If we take his point to revisit VR, empathetic immersion may offer an illusion of interspecies interaction, while in fact it may fabricate unidirectional human speech without response.

This tension is embedded in the vey technological premise of VR, which is celebrated for its multi-sensorial immersive realism, ‘the totalization of its virtual real’ that dissolves screen boundaries allowing the user to freely navigate the virtual world as if it were a perfect simulation of reality (Ng, 2021: 108). As Jaron Lanier, a leading developer who coined the term ‘virtual reality’, puts it, ‘With a VR system you don’t see the computer anymore—it’s gone. All that’s there is you’ (Lanier and Biocca, 1992: 166). However, the assumption of transparency can obscure the constructedness of experiences and foreclose critical awareness. ‘The VR ideal of a transparent medium is heretic in an age that regards signs as the substance of all realities’, writes Marie-Laure Ryan who cautions that ‘a mode of communication that strives toward transparency of the medium bereaves the user of his critical faculties’ (1999: 121). The loss of critical awareness is what she terms ‘semiotic blindness caused by immersion’ (1999: 121), in which the ‘“virtual reality effect” is the denial of the role of signs (bits, pixels, and binary codes) in the production of what the user experiences as unmediated presence' (113). The belief that VR technology is driven by creating a perfect copy of external reality assumes that the lived world is reducible and alienable to being computed as an object world out there, while perception is but ‘a passive conduit’ for data processing and representations from the environment to the mind (Hillis, 1999: 118). In this myth of transparency, the branding of VR reproduces the Cartesian duality between mind–body, virtuality–reality, and technology–nature.

No matter how real and multimodal VR designs are, they are a form of hyper-real simulacrum and anthropotechnical media that can never replace the molecular, multisensory, and contingent interactivity among beings placed within living ecologies (the earth media itself). Projects that presume immersive VR can stand in for the real reduce empathy to a depoliticized feeling curated, privatized, and consumed with no demand for accountability and reciprocity in the warming ocean, factory farm, and refugee camp. To be sure, it is not always possible and environmental to access these places. VR affords immersive presence in places and scenarios inaccessible to humans, including flying in the outer space, diving among coral reefs, or going inside a molecule. It can also make the invisible visible, enabling users to experience environmental processes such as Stanford VHIL’s modelling of a century of ocean acidification and its impact on reef biodiversity (Jerowsky M and Borda A, 2022). But when empathy is stripped off relational contingency and marketed as a customizable event automated by technology, VR perspective-taking can operate as a one-way gesture that maintains the species hierarchies it claims to redress by speaking as and for nonhuman beings whose umwelt remains inexpressible in human terms.

To reimagine empathy, then, is not simply to ask who feels and what is felt, but to interrogate the affective apparatus of VR and its capacity, and incapacity, to enact reciprocity and response. If affect is to remain a locus of ethical and social transformation for immersive media, it must be oriented away from the (neo)colonial desire for assimilation to address an immanent ethics of response-ability, including curating encounters of conflict and becoming-with. Response-ability as a strategy for living in the Anthropocene differs from individualist and human exceptionalist ideas of responsibility to emphasize our everyday capacity to respond to heterogeneous others (Haraway, 2016). Vinciane Despret, for instance, suggests that empathy is not feeling with one’s own body what the other feels, but rather a creative mode of attunement ‘making the body available for the response of another being’, thus opening the possibilities of an embodied communication (Despret, 2013: 70). To cultivate embodied response-ability, VR narratives must stage encounters where empathy is relieved of the demand for authenticity and no longer a technological shortcut to replace another’s subjectivity, but what generates partial affinities that acknowledge differences. This means supporting narratives that open onto nonhuman sentience and alterity, the ambivalence of meaning, encounter instead of control, and imaginative metamorphoses that invite users into shared vulnerability and solidarity, discomfort, rupture, wonder, and affective excess, beyond a moralized focus on human empathy for another’s suffering.

When narrating the nonhuman, VR storytellers must take seriously the gap between immersive presence and ethical response. I can offer an example, based on real life, to illustrate this point. During a screening of our VR film Bovine Calling: A VR Story of Eco-Vulnerability in Hong Kong (Zong and Gearin, 2023), which explores the shared precarity of cows, buffaloes, and humans in the neoliberal metropolis, one audience responded to a wet market scene depicting a butcher and hanging meat by remarking on how ‘delicious’ the beef looked. Despite the film’s theme of interspecies care, this reaction reveals the affective ambivalence of VR spectatorship. I take this moment as a reminder that immersive media is not a linear transmission of ethical meaning. It is a unpredictable interface where users bring in their own cultural habits of perception and consumer desires and where ethical provocations may inspire, misfire, be resisted or negotiated in dissonant ways.

There is thus a contradiction in the VR as empathy machine discourse when advocates seek to leverage firsthand immersion in the ‘real’ and the technological allure of unmediated presence. For instance, the Becoming Homeless project claims to let users ‘spend days in the life of someone who can no longer afford a home. . . as you walk in another’s shoes and face the adversity of living with diminishing resources’ (Stanford VHIL, 2017). The Machines to Be Another project by BeAnotherLab Team uses first-person audiovisual synchronization to simulate inhabiting another’s body, whether across gender, race, or ability, ‘making the world a better place’ by virtually giving users ‘access to the body and mind of another person’ (2014). These projects reiterate the belief that technological mirroring can grant access to another’s subjectivity and solve social problems. Despite their aspirational language, there have been critiques of the self-promotional and definitional ambiguity of empathy in VR. A recent study of 640 popular press and 53 academic articles finds that empathy is often vaguely defined, with little interrogation of the power structures underlying its interpretation; the actors deploying VR devices and their interests in retaining discursive power over its uses remain largely unexamined; and popular media tends to celebrate empathy to ‘deepen the institutional norms of specific industries—technology, journalism, and global advocacy among others—as a new frontier to extend their influence’ (Foxman et al., 2021: 2182). Moreover, research indicates that the meaning of immersion in VR strongly depends on the traits, intentions, and contexts of users, which significantly influences empathy measurement (Shin and Biocca, 2018: 2802).

The irony of ‘walking in another’s shoes’ is that VR does not, and perhaps cannot, escape mediation. In pursuing what it is ‘really like’, the techno-hype of immersive empathy may end up foreclosing the kind of reciprocal and antagonistic responses that Baudrillard sees as vital to social exchange. Indeed, VR has been critiqued to sustain the production of ‘hyper-real transcendence’ that relies on ‘rhetorics of disembodiment, immortality, and extra-human reproductive and generative powers within virtual space’ (Weinstone, 1997: 76-77). As Ann Weinstone writes, ‘VR demands, as the price of transcendence, that the user become of the medium, of the other, through a relationship of compulsion, penetration, repetition, and bodily subsumption’ (1997: 78). Transcendence commences through the codes of technological idealism, transhumanist immortality, and the substitution of biological bodies with virtual bodies. Code comes to function as ‘the transcendental, unifying, and ideal substance of life—for the nonreferential, the unmediated’ – while at the same time retaining the trace of writing, replacing the body with ‘a less mortal letter’ (Weinstone, 1997: 78). In addition to VR, the rise of AI has also been read by some as an expression of human eschatological desire to escape earthly limitations by imagining virtual bodies and immortal mechanical minds as evolutionary paths to salvation (Geraci, 2006: 233). In this sense, technology is imbued with utopic promises.

As an environmental humanities scholar passionate about VR filmmaking, I am drawn to the creative and narrative potential of immersive media. I am interested in VR less as a transparent vehicle of truth than as a narrative medium shaped by artistic practices and cultural worldviews. Instead of asking whether VR can simulate access to another’s inner world, I revisit mimesis as a generative frame that foregrounds the aesthetic, affective, and relational processes of becoming-with through which emotions are evoked and nonhuman worlds partially encountered. In the sense of sympoiesis and worlding-with, mimetic practice offers an alternative way of approaching immersive media as a technology that mediates impersonal and affective resonances between communicative bodies. It is through acknowledging, rather than denying, mimesis and mediation that we move beyond the fake-real binary dominating VR empathy to arrive at a participatory view of immersive media as regenerative worldmaking practices across nature, technology, and culture. A mimetic view affirms incommensurability and difference between humans and nonhumans as conditions for VR creativity and multispecies ethics. In this sense, VR opens a door to more than empathetic understanding. It invites narratives, methods, and practices that explore the virtual as a speculative interface for ethical rehearsal and sympoietic becoming.

Mimetic sympoiesis: VR as a participatory interface for regenerative media

Mimesis has long signified the bodily capacity to perceive and express through similarity in nature, whether in the mimicry of animals, children’s play in games, or human dance, ritual, imagination, and language (Benjamin, 1933). From early life forms to primates, animals observe, mimic, and learn from others, a capacity that becomes increasingly complex in mammals through facial expression, vocalization, and social life. Empathy is described as ‘the highest human expression of a broader biological capacity for mimesis’ across species (Hurlbut, 1997:15). Neurobiological theories suggest that the mimetic capacity for empathy culminates in the human face as a ‘canvas of communication’ through which we express and recognize a wider range of emotions and form social bonding and ethical responsiveness between self and other (Hurlbut, 1997: 20). Although common in explanations of empathy, neurological determinism can reduce culture to biology and describe empathy as an internal and nonconscious reflex of the brain to be triggered rather than a relational, specific articulation of affectivity (Bollmer, 2017: 64). But we know that the face mediates an interiority beyond the self, as it reveals the inherent sociality of relation that does not rely on transparency but on the interplay between the visible and the hidden, truth and deception, totality and infinity, resisting full empathetic understanding (Bollmer, 2017: 71). Therefore, mimesis cannot be equated with identification. It names an ethical and creative tension between world and word, flesh and virtuality, and the desire to understand and the irreducible alterity of another.

This entangled view of mimesis, at once biological, affective, and ethical, complements its foundational role in aesthetic theory. Mimesis is ‘integral to the relationship between art and nature, and to the relation governing works of art themselves’ (Puetz, 2002). Differing from Platonic doubt that mimesis is deceptive and inferior to the ‘real’, Aristotle views mimesis and the arts as ‘fundamental expressions of our human experience within the world – as means of learning about nature that, through the perceptual experience, allow us to get closer to the “real”' (Puetz, 2002). In Poetics, Aristotle makes a link between mimesis and poiesis (the process of making) to conceive art (image, poetry, and tragedy) as a creative process. As Christoph Wulf and Gunter Gebauer explain,

For Aristotle, mimesis embraces not only the re-creation of existing objects but also the possibility to change them, and thus to beautify, improve, and universalize individual qualities.

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mimesis also comes to designate the imitation and the manner in which, in art as in nature, creation takes place (natura naturans). The creative force emerges as something that nature and humans have in common; it characterizes a fundamental feature of the human being, a source of pleasure and a capacity to learn. (2014)

Despite ongoing debate over Aristotelian anthropocentrism toward plants and animals, which is beyond the scope of this article, his view of art and nature provides a way to conceive mimesis as a human technē (craft) that takes seriously and co-creates with nature’s own craftmanship and expressive ontology (its earthly poiesis). This lends support to my argument for mimetic sympoiesis as an environmental and ethical orientation for rethinking immersive media that has yet to be fully explored. More than simply replicating nature and reality, a medium like VR storytelling might be said to stage generative conditions for relational mimesis by rendering reality partially intelligible through virtual milieu, narrative, and sensory immersion, merging existence with expression. Mimesis liberates VR from representational fidelity. It opens VR to explore other dimensions such as how its technological affordances might conceal or facilitate affective experiences of more-than-human existence. As Bakker compels us to ask, ‘What if virtual and augmented reality projects were “spaces to be navigated through,” rather than merely films to be experienced?’ (2024: 178). Treating VR as mimesis is a cyborgian move that destabilize the humanist divides between artifice and life and the modern notion of media as technological vehicles for human intention alone.

In the Anthropocene where extractive capitalism and the global technosphere continue to destroy species and cultural diversity, mimetic sympoiesis becomes a urgent worlding tool for regenerative futures. Haraway explains that staying with the trouble on a damaged planet demands science-art worlding practices for noticing collaborative survival. Sympoiesis is a process of multispecies becoming-with, in which critters do not precede their relations but ‘make each other through semiotic material involution’, building upon evolutionary history while also experimentally crafting new interspecies lives and worlds (Haraway, 2016: 60). Drawing on Hustak and Myers’ concept of involutionary momentum, Haraway recounts the reciprocal mimesis of orchids and their insect pollinators, in which orchid flowers mimic the genitals of female insects needed for pollination. The orchid’s mimicry is not mere biological deception, as neo-Darwinians claims; rather, it ‘amplifies accounts of the creative, improvisational, and fleeting practices through which plants and insects involve themselves in another’s lives’ (Haraway 69; emphasis in original). Interspecies mimesis thus tells situated stories in which living life are not individuals but co-makers of wondrous inventions of ecological interdependence. These sympoietic stories in living ecologies call for media practices that collaborate between sciences, arts, storytelling, digital designs, and nonhuman agency, to take us beyond modern individualism.

Understanding mimesis as simultaneously ecological and expressive allows us to reimagine media as more than representational surfaces. Recent ecomedia scholarship goes beyond human-centric definitions to reframe media as hybrid ensembles of natural elements and human crafts, whereby media becomes infrastructures of life. As John Durham Peters argues, ‘A medium must not mean but be’ (2015: 14); they are not only carriers of messages but also ‘infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are’ (2015: 15). To Peters, human devices and natural elements are both media, with the sea, cloud, climate, and fire being repositories of meanings that sustain and enable existence, just as computers and the Internet have reshaped how we inhabit our environments and bodies in the digital era. This naturecultural view of media provides a foundation for rethinking VR as a sympoietic medium that reconfigures relations among human, nonhuman, and technological agencies. Like ritual and game, VR operates through repetition with variation: each virtual experience may invite users into temporary social roles, multisensory and synesthetic embodiments, and affective attachments; each virtual encounter interacts with the user’s values and cultural positioning, yet also opens toward unfamiliar ways of sensing, knowing, and being. The power of VR lies in this immersive mimesis of becoming-with simulation: by holding open a contextual and generative interface between art and life, it creates a virtuality for speculative rehearsal, where transformative meaning, responsiveness, and alternative ways of experiencing the world may iteratively emerge through encounters with difference.

My claim is that VR should not only simulate, it must regenerate. If regenerative thinking, as articulated by Reed and others, shifts humans from ‘doing things to’ nature toward reciprocal relationships with living systems (Gibbons, 2020; Reed, 2007), then regenerative media must similarly move beyond anthropocentric narratives of empathetic didacticism and technological efficiency. In the face of climate change, it is no longer tenable to rely on a mechanistic worldview of fragmented solutions and short-term technofixes that continue to separate technology, nature, and worldview. A mechanistic worldview and the emphasis on individualism and competition have led to the prioritization of certain ideas and processes such as ‘linearity, separation, replicability, reductionism, homogenisation and growth’ over other perspectives like holism and co-evolution (Warden, 2021: 28). Media becomes regenerative when it cultivates holistic continuity and co-invention between human cultural technics and the expressive crafting agency of the Earth, its rhythms, mutations, and multispecies affectivity.

If VR were to be a form of regenerative media, it must be reimagined as a mimetic platform that is at once speculative and opaque, not linear and transparent. It should open onto cosmotechnics and technodiversity, or ‘a multiplicity of technics, characterized by different dynamics between the cosmic, the moral, and the technical’ (Hui, 2021: 54). Mimesis is inseparable from alterity, as anthropologist Michael Taussig shows how colonized peoples have purposed colonial technologies like uniforms, mirrors, and photographs into tools of self-fashioning and spiritual resistance (1993). Against the colonial desire to assimilate the other, mimesis sustains what Taussig calls a ‘magical’ relation to alterity, resisting the colonial urge to possess knowledge by holding space for the unknown. To Nicholas Mirzoeff, alterity is central to a politics of visuality, which is not necessarily about images but also about ways of ordering reality and worldmaking in relation to visual technologies of Western hegemony (2011: 10). For Mirzoeff, modernity is an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, with hegemonic orders from plantation slavery to the military-industrial complex countered by the enslaved, the colonized, and opponents of war who assert ‘the right to look’, or the right to the real. The same contest would apply to VR spaces. The mimetic agency of VR experiences may legitimize colonial orders of perception while also engendering countervisual and decolonial possibilities in which the other looks back.

Hence, regenerative thinking resists the anthropocentric worldview underpinning empathetic VR’s relation to reality and reorients digital and immersive media toward mimetic sympoiesis. Sympoietic practices can be found in the work of Indigenous creatives who repurpose video games and VR to make space for Indigenous environmental knowledge and decolonization. Haraway’s discussion of Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna), a video game co-developed with the Inupiat people in Alaska (2016: 86–89) offers a compelling example of regenerative media. Players take on the role of a young Inupiat girl and her Arctic fox companion as they navigate obstacles to uncover the source of a blizzard threatening their land, guided by spirit helpers and ancestral stories. The game’s refusal to offer animism as New Age aesthetic and its insistence on the authority of Indigenous language, kinship, and spiritual cosmology demonstrates how video game storytelling can become a sympoietic and decolonial practice of situated worlding. Never Alone shows that mimetic sympoiesis in digital media, when designed properly, can evoke affective attachments and stage alterity without exoticization, inviting users to make kin and become with threatened more-than-human places and beings in response-able ways.

Another example can be seen in VR narratives that draw on Indigenous futurisms. Indigenous futurism is a phrase originally coined by Grace Dillion to describe how Indigenous science fiction writers mobilize speculative genres and new media technologies to revitalize ancestral pasts and imagine possible futures (2012). The term has since become popularized to refer to Indigenous writers and artists adopting advanced technologies to unsettle Western linear progress and regenerate Indigenous spiritual and cultural memories and place-based relations. In response to debates within mainstream VR discourses over the medium as disembodying or illusory, Indigenous futurisms reveal VR as a space of continuity, where virtual and real, past and future, mind and body, and spirt and land are all connected. This is because many Indigenous communities have long negotiated apocalyptic conditions under colonialism, in which corporeal disconnect is not necessarily speculative but lived through dispossession from land, language, and representation (Wallis and Ross, 2020: 317). As Māori anthropologist Keziah Wallis and Miriam Ross observe in their Fourth VR database, a collection of over 40 Indigenous VR projects worldwide, these works often foreground native languages, articulate activism, embody connections between past, present, and future, and demonstrate ‘the interconnectivity of all living things’ (2021: 326). Among projects included in the database are Thalu, which guides users to scared sites of the Ngarluma people vulnerable to mining in Northwestern Australia and invites them into custodianship through activities such as sending up the fish spirit, fending off storms, and calling upon birds and wind to lift the spirits of the land; Future Dreaming, which playfully fuses Indigenous futurism with ancestral dreaming by imagining a future led by Indigenous people and their more-than-human kin; and Barrawao, which introduce users to the deep connection between language and country in embodied and experiential ways. VR becomes a regenerative space for decolonial storytelling by enabling Indigenous creators to speak back to colonial visual technologies and Eurocentric mode of production and distribution and to sustain reciprocal relations with land and water in possible sympoietic futures.

Indigenous theories of virtuality invite us to rethink digital experience as a regenerative return to body and land, opening the possibility of media spaces where embodiment and material embeddedness inform alternative understanding of posthuman subjectivity. As Kanien’kehaka artist Jackson 2Bears asks in his reading of Yuxweluptun’s Inherent Rights, Vision Rights, a VR simulation of a Coast Salish long house: ‘Can we think about Yuxweluptun’s VR helmet as being analogous to the Sxwaixwe mask, a spiritual mediator between the incommensurable, death and life, embodiment and disembodiment, virtuality and flesh?’ (2010). 2Bears proposes that ‘an Indigenous theory of virtuality would be about thinking technology animistically’, whereby computer simulations and the technological are not denial of existence and the natural world, but rather ‘simulations that return to embed themselves back into the material instantiation of the flesh and reinscribe an emotional and unconscious identity with biological organisms, spirits and other natural phenomenon’ (2010). For 2Bears, the digital drums, virtual fire, and masked avatars in Yuxweluptun’s VR story are spirit-simulations of a sacred ceremony and landscape that engage users in interconnected, coexisting ontologies, in which VR becomes a participatory medium for ‘the becoming-hauntological of virtuality’ allowing Indigenous stories and peoples to find new meaning (2010). The hauntological dimensions of VR point to its regenerative capacity to be more than an object of technological fascination to instead regenerate ancestral memories and sympoietic time-spaces overshadowed by the totalizing power of modern technology.

A further aspect of mimetic sympoiesis in VR that deserves closer attention is the interactivity that emerges when nonhumans encounter the camera and co-make the media event. For instance, when shooting Bovine Calling, our team left a camera in the field and a few cows decided to look at it, sniff it, and lick it, with the footage showing their eyes, noses, and tongues in an intimate encounter with the VR camera (see Figure 1). In the headset, the camera becomes the user’s perspective, making it seem as though the cows are licking the user. This unpredictable interactivity emphasizes ‘the unexpected and the agentic in the nonhuman world’ through ‘animals “doing” things with technology’ (Smaill, 2016: 141). The nighttime setting of the scene further amplifies an affective atmosphere of vulnerability, uncertainty, and intimacy breaching boundaries of discrete bodies. As one user shared afterwards, ‘it feels like I am being eaten by them [the cows]!’ testifying to how the encounter displaces human mastery and acknowledges how we share fleshy and exposed embodiment with animals.

Figure 1.

Cows start to interact with the camera. Source: Bovine Calling.

In this experience, the VR camera apparatus is pushed beyond humanist spectatorship to mediate a multispecies worldmaking moment between technology, human, and nonhuman, with the gaze and sentience of animals returning a countervisuality that further provokes affective and embodied responses from users. VR storytelling as such is no longer confined to controlled scripts and the realist aesthetics expands beyond questions of verisimilitude to make space for a sympoietic worlding that arises from unpredictability, nonhuman agency, and becoming-with. Bovine Calling enacts the theoretical claim that VR, when practised mimetically and sympoietically, can become a form of regenerative media. The above scene is regenerative of relations through cross-species interactivity and embodied response-ability, regenerative of perception through the return of nonhuman gaze, and regenerative of form through unscripted and reciprocal mediation. This regenerative capacity explores how VR narratives can shape an environmental imagination of media in which affective, ethical, and technological processes intra-act in response to the more-than-human world.

Conclusion

Regenerative media call for participatory worldmaking that unsettles technological transcendence with the iterative difference of virtual practices. This article has argued that virtual reality, when reimagined through cultural narratives and practices of mimetic sympoiesis, opens space for environmental storytelling that resists the anthropocentric myths of transparent understanding, moral individualism, and autonomous empathy. Instead of empathy machine, I have proposed a mimetic reorientation of VR as a collaborative and reciprocal interface across human, nature, and technology, with potential to regenerate the conditions for more-than-human flourishing. Mimetic sympoiesis has implications across the affective, epistemic, perceptual, and ethical dimensions of VR storytelling: affectively, by shifting from cultivating individual moral sentiment to a multispecies ethics of response-ability; epistemologically, by turning from empathetic authenticity to mimetic ambivalence; perceptually, by transforming from passive immersion to collaborative worldmaking; and ethically, by moving beyond assimilatory identification toward compassionate coexistence with difference. When aligned with specific worldviews, memories, and Indigenous wisdom traditions, VR storytelling can function as a decolonial and futuristic technology for rehearsing how we become-with virtuality in the thick of planetary precarity. To this end, there remains abundant space for immersive media not only to represent but to actively regenerate more livable futures on our communicative planet.