/lick is an interactive installation cataloguing the endangered species of the digital world. Bringing together the mechanics of online gaming with the presentation strategies of the laboratory, this project creates unexpected points of contact between human and digital bodies.

This project arises from a deep curiosity in the ways that the natural world is packaged for consumption within scientific and ludological contexts. At its core, /lick explores how we can expand our sense of care for non-human agents, not only those who inhabit the lived natural world but also those who occupy the intangible terrains of the digital realm.

/lick is driven by overarching questions surrounding nature and technology: How do our engagements with virtual nature reinforce capitalist notions of nature as resource? How can technological nature help us interrogate and redefine our relationship to the lived natural world? And can technological nature serve to destabilize strict divisions between the natural and the artificial? Ultimately, we want to reconsider our sensory engagement with virtual space, to see how---and indeed if---we can develop deeper connections to our digital (and non-digital) kin.

Mirroring hacker-aesthetics, /lick features modular, deployable, Pelican-case computers. Each screen is populated by a unique, animated digital body, and viewers are invited to interact via chat box. Video game-inspired emotes structure the interaction: viewers can /lick, /touch, or /smell the creatures (among other sensory-based emotes), with each command eliciting randomized responses that challenge our expectations of both technology and the natural world. The computers themselves are plugged to a single, wall-mounted, artificial rock, turning the exhibition space into a terrain of its own.

/lick offers unique and ephemeral virtual bodies, seemingly imbued with their own personalities and temperaments, in contrast to traditional digital contexts where flora and fauna are commodified and considered to be interchangeable, immutable, and inexhaustible. In video game environments specifically, natural resources are presented as static, offered as either untouchable elements of the landscape, or as endlessly respawning resources available to players for in-game crafting.

The screens of /lick function as a point of contact between the viewer and the digital, acting as portable terrariums for lively digital beings, rather than freezing the natural world within static vessels. On a material level, this project considers the screen as a physical constraint that separates the digital world from us and us from it, much like the glass of the museum display. Cultural theorist Paul Virilio affirms that the transparency of physical space was first replaced by the direct transparency of the glass window but has now shifted to the indirect transparency of the screen. For Virilio, the image on the screen allows us to forget the materiality of not only the screen but also of ourselves. The density and thickness of our physical bodies are lost in the screen, complicating the relationship between what we perceive and what we can interact with on a physical level. But what if the screen is not just a portal, but it is also a container?

Faced with environmental collapse following a global pandemic, there is deep urgency to finding more meaningful ways of relating to the virtual world, both in and of itself and as a means to developing better relations IRL (in real life). For /lick, we focus on our experience of the natural world within virtual spaces (or technological nature), specifically online multiplayer video games. Over the past decade, online games have assumed a position of primacy within the global media industry, which has been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, making them a rich site in which to explore both technological nature and human-digital interaction.