The Animal Body and Image in Digital Environmental Projects

Abstract

This article explores how humans are developing the digital environment by representing wildlife, and animals in particular, within its space. It explores contemporary environmental discourse, which is acquiring a virtual dimension, and projects aimed at integrating nature and technology. The text analyzes approaches to the problem of animal representation, presented in the works of contemporary authors, philosophers and natural researchers, such as John Berger, Tatyana Goricheva, Oksana Timofeeva, Alexander Pshera and others. The phenomenon of “animal extinction”, their marginalization and exploitation in the context of contemporary culture is explored, and possible ways to overcome this crisis are outlined. The author analyzes the trend associated with the development of contemplative, imaginative practices in the context of digital ecology and determines their role in the formation of an ethical approach to animals.

The main hypothesis of the article is that by representing the animal's corporeality in the modern digital space, humans strive to create and develop not only a digital, but primarily a living environment. At the same time, the formation of a digital image of an animal can also influence its own corporeality, blurring and changing its previous boundaries of life and ways of existence; this tendency contains existential risks. Taking this into account, it becomes clear that environmental ethics in its modern invariants becomes possible and is developed in those projects and practices in which the existential status of the animal is preserved.