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

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.