Edges of Immersion: Data Translation into Ecoaesthetic Experience 397

Climate change is increasingly encountered through data, models, and sensor-based measurements that operate beyond direct human perception. While scientifically meaningful, these representations often remain abstract and experientially distant. This paper examines how immersive media translate environmental data into ecoaesthetic experience, enabling ecological processes to be sensorially engaged. Climate perception has increasingly been explored through VR-based embodied experiences in scientific and artistic research; however, these works do not address how immersion is constructed or how ecoaesthetic and artistic strategies enable perceptual shifts between sensing environmental phenomena and recognizing their mediation. We introduce the concept of edges of immersion to describe moments where experiential coherence is strategically modulated through attenuation (the deliberate reduction of perceptual coherence), allowing mediation to become perceptible. Rather than grounding immersion primarily in technological advances, these edge conditions show how it is constructed through aesthetic and spatio-compositional strategies of data translation. The argument is developed through a case study of Atmospheric Forest (2020) , an immersive ecoaesthetic artwork that integrates LiDAR scans of a drought-affected Alpine forest with long-term environmental monitoring data, including volatile organic compound emissions, soil moisture, temperature, and humidity. In this work, data sensorialization—the spatial, temporal, and audiovisual composition of data—is used to transform ecological processes into experientially accessible forms across both VR and multi-channel installation formats. By examining the edges of immersion, this paper articulates a set of artistic strategies shaping perception within immersive ecoaesthetic environments that operate as spaces where scientific data are translated into situated, multisensory experience, contributing to the formation of climate imaginaries.