Topic

“Worlding the Digital Skin: Reciprocal Animations in Planetary Media Architecture”
Ina Conradi, NTU Singapore
21 November 2025

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Abstract

This presentation explores worlding as both ontological process and artistic practice—an encounter where humans, technologies, and environments co-create reality. Drawing from Heidegger’s concept of Dasein—being-in-the-world as the site where meaning unfolds (Heidegger, 1962)—and Cuauhtencoztli’s poetic cosmology, where existence is sustained through flower and song (in xochitl in cuicatl) as reciprocal acts of renewal (León-Portilla, 1963), the paper proposes a model of reciprocal animation: humans and cosmos continually world each other through word, ritual, and art.

Within the framework of Media Art Nexus (Singapore) and the City Digital Skin Art Festival (CDSA), monumental LED façades are reimagined as membranes of relation rather than instruments of display. These architectures of light act as biocultural worldings—spaces where Indigenous cosmologies, ecological systems, and computational media converge. This reading aligns with Haraway’s (2016) and Spivak’s (1999) use of “worlding” as a decolonial and multispecies practice of coexistence.

By interweaving Heidegger’s ontology of disclosure with Cuauhtencoztli’s cosmopoetic understanding of creation, the presentation reframes worlding as an act of care and reciprocity across planetary scales. It argues that artists working with digital public space are not simply representing the world—they are helping the world to world itself anew, through light, code, and collective imagination.

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References

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927).
León-Portilla, M. (1963). Aztec thought and culture: A study of the ancient Nahuatl mind. University of Oklahoma Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. Harvard University Press.

Link to Canva Presentation https://www.canva.com/design/DAG47Q7Skpo/J74mucbbq_LDBmJyUS5Seg/edit?utm_content=DAG47Q7Skpo&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton