Aṭlāl Al-Muqāwama (ruins of resistance): digital counter-mapping, memory, and worldbuilding in the practice of contemporary West Asian artists

1 Introduction

Over the last two decades, immersive media has emerged as a critical terrain for artistic practices that confront historical erasure, colonial violence, and the instability of cultural memory. Technologies such as virtual reality, networked platforms, video game engines, and multi-channel installations are no longer approached solely as tools for heightened realism or experiential spectacle. Rather, they are increasingly mobilised as epistemic infrastructures through which artists interrogate how space, history, and subjectivity are produced, governed, and contested. Within this shift, immersive media has become a particularly significant site for decolonial practice, not because it promises total immersion or empathic access, but because it enables fragmented, participatory, and non-linear engagements with histories that resist closure.

This article develops a conceptual analysis of immersive digital art as a form of counter-mapping and counter-archival practice in contemporary West Asian and diasporic contexts. In this study, conceptual analysis refers to a theoretically grounded interpretive methodology that examines how immersive artistic practices produce and mobilise concepts such as immersion, counter-mapping, world-building, and decolonial memory through aesthetic form, spatial interaction, and digital mediation. Rather than evaluating artworks through formalist or technological criteria alone, the analysis focuses on how immersive environments function as epistemic and political structures that shape relations between memory, embodiment, space, and participation.

The selected case studies were chosen according to three interrelated criteria: first, their engagement with immersive or spatially navigable digital media; second, their explicit confrontation with histories of colonial violence, displacement, or archival erasure in West Asian and diasporic contexts; and third, their use of participatory, fragmented, or non-linear forms of storytelling that challenge dominant visual and cartographic culture. The article comparatively analyses works by Palestinian, Iranian artists working across Google Street View film (Razan AlSalah), modded game environments (Firas Shehadeh), participatory online performance archives (Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme), and research-based XR installations (Morehshin Allahyari). Through these examples, the article argues that immersive storytelling operates as a spatial and ethical methodology rather than merely as a representational technique.

The analytical framework combines media theory, decolonial thought, digital aesthetics, and theories of counter-mapping to interpret how immersive technologies are reconfigured from instruments historically associated with military simulation, cartographic domination, and surveillance into tools for resistance, memory, and world-making. Hito Steyerl's formulation of the poor image, articulated in “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2009), provides a lens for understanding degraded and widely circulated digital fragments as politically charged forms of visual testimony rather than evidentiary failures. Laura U. Marks's articulation of an Islamic genealogy of new media, developed in Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010), offers an alternative model of visuality grounded in enfoldment, haptic perception, and non-linear temporality, challenging Western systems of optical mastery and linear historical narration. These frameworks are brought into dialogue with methods of counter-mapping, world-building, and digital ethics, particularly in relation to immersive platforms and metaverse infrastructures as sites of both colonial reproduction and decolonial possibility.

By analysing immersive works that span online platforms, virtual environments, game engines, and installation-based practices, the article demonstrates how immersion enables decentralised forms of participation and collective appearance. Viewers are positioned not as consumers of narrative resolution but as embodied participants navigating unstable spatial and temporal conditions. Immersive media, in this context, becomes a contested terrain where memory is rehearsed rather than preserved, where myth operates as a living archive, and where digital space is reclaimed as a site of ethical and political agency.

The article proceeds by outlining a conceptual framework for immersion, counter-mapping, Islamicate aesthetics, and decolonial world-building, followed by comparative analyses of the selected artistic practices. It concludes by reflecting on the ethical implications of immersive storytelling within metaverse infrastructures and by proposing immersion as a critical methodology for sustaining memory, resistance, and collective futures under conditions marked by ongoing colonial violence.

2 Manuscript formatting

2.1 Immersion, representation, and decolonial imagination

In this article, immersion is understood not simply as a sensory effect produced by technological realism, but as a spatial and participatory condition through which users engage contested histories and mediated environments (Murray 1997; Ryan 2015). Rather than producing seamless illusion, the immersive practices examined here operate through fragmentation, interruption, and unstable navigation, foregrounding the political conditions through which memory and visibility are constructed. This understanding intersects with counter-mapping, defined here as a decolonial practice that challenges dominant spatial representations and the power relations embedded within cartographic systems (Peluso 1995). In immersive media, counter-mapping extends beyond alternative cartographies toward the reconfiguration of spatial memory, territorial belonging, and digital visibility. The article further situates these practices within an Islamicate aesthetic framework derived from Hodgson’s (1974) concept of the Islamicate, referring to cultural and visual formations shaped by Islamic histories without being limited to religious doctrine. Within contemporary immersive art, this framework emerges through non-linear temporality, poetic fragmentation, geometric spatiality, and multisensory forms of narration. These concepts converge through world-building, understood as the construction of narrative and spatial environments that organise identities, affects, and systems of meaning (Wolf 2012). Rather than functioning as escapist simulations, the immersive worlds analysed here operate as decolonial spaces for rehearsing collective memory, displaced identities, and speculative futures.

The rise of immersive media, encompassing Extended Reality (XR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Augmented Reality (AR), marks a paradigm shift in media experience, transforming spectatorship into participatory presence. Michael J. P. Wolf (2012) argues that worldbuilding is not merely the act of constructing imaginary spaces but a deep cultural practice that encodes ideology, technology, and affect. When applied to immersive media, worldbuilding becomes an act of spatial storytelling that allows users to inhabit ideological and aesthetic environments. These immersive ecosystems function as laboratories for alternative realities, an essential function in a world where narrative and space intertwine to produce knowledge and identity. Within this article, immersive practices are understood as operating across interconnected analytical stages: first, through the counter-mapping of colonial infrastructures and dominant spatial narratives; second, through participatory rehearsals of alternative identities and collective memory; and third, through speculative forms of world-building that imagine decolonial futures beyond territorial and epistemic enclosure.

Wolf's conceptualization intersects with Said’s (1978) critique of Orientalism, which highlights how Western representations construct “the East” as an object of control and fantasy. In the immersive age, these representational structures migrate into digital form through VR worlds, 3D simulations, and augmented environments that continue to reproduce or contest hierarchies of visibility and voice. Immersive technologies therefore inherit longer histories of visual control and representational dominance that shape how space, culture, and difference are rendered perceptible. At the same time, immersive artistic practices can intervene in these infrastructures by exposing, fragmenting, and reconfiguring the spatial logics through which colonial power operates.

Maryam Kamil's work on decolonial futures situates digital infrastructures as both oppressive and liberatory terrains. Her notion of imagined geographies of Palestine (Kamil, 2019) expands Said's geography of representation into the digital realm, proposing that immersive and networked media can become tools for counter-mapping and resistance. Counter-mapping, in this context, refers not simply to redrawing borders but to reimagining spatial and temporal belonging; to map, as Kamil suggests, is to narrate presence against erasure. These practices move beyond cartographic correction toward forms of participatory spatial rehearsal in which users navigate unstable archives, fragmented memories, and contested territories.

This aligns with Peluso’s (1995) framework of counter-mapping as a practice of spatial justice and with Stuart Hall’s (1990) concept of diasporic identity, where identity is conceived as a production that is “always in process.” For artists and theorists in West Asia and the broader Islamicate world, immersive technologies offer tools to reclaim narrative agency through collaborative and experiential forms of storytelling. The digital map, the virtual installation, and the augmented image function not only as decolonial gestures, but also as environments through which alternative identities and communal forms of appearance can be rehearsed and negotiated

Marshall Hodgson’s (1974). notion of the Islamicate world provides a critical vocabulary for understanding cultural formations influenced by Islam yet not confined to its theological dimensions. Within media studies, this concept offers a lens through which artists from Muslim-majority or historically Islamicate regions negotiate global visual cultures while articulating situated aesthetic practices. The Islamicate, as Hodgson envisioned it, transcends national boundaries; it is an ecology of images, affects, and historical continuities extending across geographies. In immersive art, this sensibility manifests through calligraphic abstraction, architectural geometry, non-linear temporality, and multisensory soundscapes that resist both homogenisation and commodified spectacle. Such practices contribute to speculative forms of world-building grounded in relationality, memory, and cultural continuity.

Stuart Hall's theorisation of cultural identity as a process rather than an essence further situates diasporic media practice within dynamics of negotiation, memory, and transformation. The diasporic artist, particularly from West Asia or the broader Islamicate world, occupies a liminal position between geographies, engaging in what Hall describes as the “production of identity through difference.” In immersive media, this translates into speculative environments that imagine alternative futures for displaced communities. Through virtual storytelling, projection mapping, modded game spaces, and interactive installations, artists construct digital landscapes of belonging that challenge fixed territorial imaginaries while proposing new collective futures.

In this sense, digital media do not merely simulate the world; diasporic communities actively reconstitute it as a site of resistance and speculative possibility. The glitch, the distortion, and the interruption become poetic devices, a glitch poetics that foregrounds error as metaphor for rupture, refusal, and survival. Building on Rosa Menkman's aesthetic of the glitch (2011), these strategies expose the fractures of technological modernity while performing what Hall (1996) describes as “the politics of representation.” Immersive media thus emerges not as a seamless technological environment but as a contested space in which counter-mapping, participatory identity formation, and decolonial world-building converge.

2.2 Counter-mapping, glitch, and immersive storytelling of digital return: analysis projects

The following analysis traces three progressively unfolding functions of immersive media in decolonial practice:

• − Counter-mapping colonial infrastructures, primary case: AlSalah; (Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba, 2018)
• − Rehearsal, participation, and the politics of immersive play, primary case: Shehadeh; (Like an Event in a Dream Dreamt by Another—Rehearsal, 2023), Abbas & Abou-Rahme; (May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth, 2015 ongoing).
• − Immersive storytelling, myth, and ethical world-making, primary case: Allahyari; (She Who Sees the Unknown, 2016–19)

2.2.1 Razan AlSalah’s your father was born 100 years old, and so was the Nakba

Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist whose practice examines digital imaging technologies, colonial visual regimes, and questions of displacement and mobility. Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) is a single-channel experimental film constructed from Google Street View imagery, archival sound, and voiceover narration. The work follows a speculative route between Haifa and Beirut, exposing how corporate cartographic systems reproduce surveillance, border politics, and historical erasure while simultaneously enabling forms of diasporic counter-memory. Rather than treating digital mapping as a neutral representational tool, AlSalah repurposes navigational interfaces as sites of interruption and political critique, demonstrating how immersive spatial media can function as counter-mapping practices that challenge colonial infrastructures and territorial visibility regimes (AlSalah 2018). Statements by the artist cited in this section are drawn from publicly available artist talks and exhibition materials contextualising the project's development and circulation.

2.2.1.1 Digital cartography as colonial infrastructure

Razan AlSalah's Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba offers a sustained conceptual interrogation of digital cartography as a colonial infrastructure. By appropriating Google Street View as her primary visual environment, AlSalah exposes the political conditions under which mapping technologies operate, particularly in relation to Palestine. Rather than functioning as neutral tools of navigation, platforms such as Google Street View reproduce regimes of enclosure, surveillance, and territorial control. The apparent promise of seamless access and spatial mastery conceals the structural violence embedded within these visual systems.

Constructed entirely from Street View imagery, the film foregrounds the impossibility of physical return for Palestinians living in exile. Digital navigation emerges not as a substitute for embodied movement but as a site where absence, denial, and dispossession are rendered visible. The work thus situates digital mapping within the longer history of colonial cartography, in which land is abstracted, flattened, and rendered governable (AlSalah 2018).

2.2.1.2 Glitch poetics and the aesthetics of disappearance

Central to AlSalah's practice is what she describes as “glitch poetics”, a methodological and aesthetic strategy that mobilises distortion, erasure, and fragmentation as critical devices (AlSalah 2018). In Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba, glitches interrupt the smooth visual coherence promised by Google Street View. These disruptions are not incidental technical failures but deliberate refusals of the medium's claim to transparency.

The fractured images function as metaphors for loss, dispossession, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence from both physical and representational space. Streets dissolve, figures disappear, and visual continuity collapses, producing a haunted digital terrain. In this sense, glitch operates as an epistemological intervention, revealing the violence of spatial abstraction and the instability of colonial visual regimes.

2.2.1.3 Hauntology, absence, and fragile memory

The film's spectral quality is further intensified through the absent search for the character Ameen, whose elusive presence gestures towards incomplete narratives and fragile memory. Navigation through Street View becomes a ghostly pursuit, marked by teleportation, temporal disjunction, and disorientation. The integration of archival materials deepens this hauntological register, situating personal and collective memory within a layered visual economy of past and present.

This haunted temporality reflects what AlSalah terms the “material aesthetics of disappearance”, addressing the erasure of Indigenous bodies and histories within colonial systems of representation (AlSalah 2018). Memory, in this framework, is neither stable nor fully recoverable. Instead, it unfolds as a fragile, unresolved process shaped by absence and delay.

2.2.1.4 Images, borders, and the logic of enclosure

AlSalah theorises images and borders as mutually constitutive, arguing that visual regimes operate as extensions of bordering practices rather than merely depicting them. In militarised contexts such as Palestine, digital imaging technologies reproduce the spatial logic of walls, checkpoints, and restricted zones. Google Street View, in particular, functions as a visual border, granting selective visibility while concealing the mechanisms of control that structure the territory.

However, AlSalah also insists that this relationship can be inverted. By disrupting the image from within, practices of resistance reveal borders themselves as images, and therefore as contestable forms. This conceptual move foregrounds a material-immaterial continuity, in which visual representation mediates between physical structures and ideological power. The image becomes a site where domination and resistance are simultaneously enacted (AlSalah, 2025).

2.2.1.5 Diaspora, mapping, and counter-memory

The user-directed motion of Street View in the film reframes mapping as a political and affective practice. AlSalah's diasporic position inflects the digital map with personal histories of displacement, transforming navigation into an act of counter-memory. The geopolitical linkage between Haifa and Beirut signifies both familial exile and a symbolic trespass across colonial borders, evoking the historical trajectory of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the restrictions imposed by militarised boundaries such as the Blue Line.

Through glitch and slowed cinematic duration, the film resists the accelerated consumption of map-images typical of social media platforms. The choice of long-form immersion enables a meditative engagement with history, countering the fragmentation and amnesia produced by contemporary visual economies. This approach situates AlSalah's practice within a broader constellation of diasporic Palestinian artists, including Kamal Aljafari, Basma Alsharif, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, who similarly interrogate the politics of image-making and circulation (AlSalah, 2025).

2.2.1.6 Remediation, the poor image, and digital resistance

AlSalah's intervention can be productively read through Bolter and Grusin's concept of remediation, understood as the refashioning of older media within new media forms that simultaneously pursue immediacy and transparency (Bolter and Grusin 1999). Google Street View exemplifies this logic by simulating continuous movement through space while masking the political and military infrastructures underpinning its production.

By introducing glitch, pixilation, and signal loss, AlSalah undermines this promise of immediacy. In doing so, she transforms the high-resolution corporate interface into what Hito Steyerl terms the “poor image”, an image marked by degradation that testifies to histories of violence and displacement (Steyerl 2009). The ghostly presence of the artist's grandmother's voice haunting the distorted streets exposes the disjunction between settler-colonial urban space and remembered Palestinian geographies.

Immersion in this fractured digital landscape produces what Steyerl describes as a visual bond, one that refuses closure and finality. Rather than affirming the Nakba as a completed historical event, AlSalah reactivates it as an ongoing temporality. The digital map is thus reclaimed as a contested terrain of counter-memory, where fragmentation and instability become durable forms of resistance against historical erasure.

2.2.2 Firas Shehadeh—like an event in a dream dreamt by another—rehearsal: immersive media, play, and colonial simulation

Firas Shehadeh is a Palestinian artist and filmmaker whose work explores virtual environments, gaming cultures, and digital mediation as spaces of political negotiation and speculative imagination. Like an Event in a Dream Dreamt by Another—Rehearsal (2023) combines Twitch livestream footage with modified environments from Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar Games 2013) to examine how Palestinian players inhabit and transform commercial gaming platforms. Rather than focusing on gameplay as entertainment, the work reframes immersive play as a participatory rehearsal of collective experience under conditions of occupation and displacement. Through modded environments, fragmented navigation, and networked spectatorship, Shehadeh demonstrates how immersive infrastructures can be repurposed to contest dominant spatial narratives and produce alternative modes of social and political presence (Shehadeh 2023). References to the artist's reflections are contextualised here as exhibition statements and curatorial materials accompanying the project's presentation.

2.2.2.1 Immersive media as a rehearsal space

Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another—Rehearsal extends contemporary debates on immersive media by situating video games not simply as representational systems, but as environments in which social, political, and affective relations are actively rehearsed. Immersive media, particularly networked game worlds, are distinguished by their capacity to produce embodied forms of engagement through spatial navigation, role-play, and real-time interaction. These environments generate a sense of presence that exceeds spectatorship, allowing users to inhabit simulated worlds while negotiating agency, constraint, and consequence.

Within such media, immersion does not signify escapism but a mode of situated participation. Open-world games, streaming platforms, and modifiable engines function as experimental zones where players test behaviours, identities, and futures that may be inaccessible or dangerous in primary reality. Immersive media thus operate as transitional spaces between lived experience and speculative possibility, particularly for subjects whose mobility and agency are structurally constrained. In this context, rehearsal emerges as a critical concept, framing immersion as an iterative and provisional process rather than a closed narrative form.

2.2.2.2 Video games as cultural and political archives

Commissioned by The Singapore Art Museum, Firas Shehadeh's single-channel video work combines found footage from Twitch livestreams with customised modifications of Grand Theft Auto V and Grand Theft Auto Online (Rockstar Games 2013). The work situates gameplay within global circuits of digital labour, spectatorship, and repetition, foregrounding gaming as a mediated social practice rather than a leisure activity. By appropriating livestream footage, Shehadeh draws attention to the performative dimensions of play, where actions are continuously watched, narrated, and archived.

Central to this approach is the treatment of game modifications as a contemporary archive. Through modding, players digitise architectural forms, urban infrastructures, and everyday objects, embedding them within the game engine. This process complicates distinctions between historical documentation and speculative reconstruction, as virtual environments become repositories of collective memory. In Shehadeh's work, the archive is neither static nor authoritative, but mutable and participatory, shaped by the contributions of players whose lived experiences inform the digital world they construct.

2.2.2.3 Los Santos as colonial hyperreality

The reconfiguration of Los Santos, the fictionalised digital replica of Los Angeles, functions as a key conceptual gesture within Rehearsal. Shehadeh frames the city as a symbolic “land of milk and honey”, invoking biblical and colonial imaginaries of abundance, promise, and conquest. This mythic framing exposes how virtual landscapes reproduce ideological narratives while remaining detached from the material histories of violence and dispossession that underpin them.

By situating Palestinian experience within this simulated geography, Shehadeh destabilises dominant associations between territory, legitimacy, and belonging. Los Santos becomes a hyperreal corollary to Palestine, not through direct representation, but through structural analogy. The rehearsal format underscores the provisional nature of this mapping, presenting the virtual city as a space of negotiation rather than resolution. Meaning is continuously reworked through repetition, failure, and adjustment, mirroring the instability of political realities under colonial conditions (Van der Linden 2025).

2.2.2.4 Role-play, movement, and colonial constraint

Role-playing games have long functioned as spaces in which aspects of lived reality are rehearsed through speculative frameworks. Since the expansion of computational power, digital games developed largely within Global North contexts have reflected specific socio-political assumptions embedded in their mechanics and narratives. However, players from the Global South have actively repurposed these systems through practices such as modding, streaming, and hacking, producing alternative hyperrealities that challenge dominant imaginaries.

In Rehearsal, Shehadeh examines how Palestinian players use customised GTA V servers to simulate everyday life under colonial rule (Shehadeh 2023). Drawing on footage analysed by Boulos (2025), the work highlights how open-world games enable forms of movement and freedom that are impossible in lived reality without mortal risk. The opening scene's contrast between an agitated police presence and a solitary figure immediately evokes power dynamics familiar to Palestinian life, aligning the game's police and robber archetypes with colonial enforcement and resistance.

The central character, identified by his white T-shirt, navigates marginal spaces such as rooftops, bridges, and alleyways. These zones, known to players as police-free or transitional areas, allow the narrated essay to unfold without interruption. The avoidance of dramatic confrontation redirects attention from spectacle to analysis, emphasising survival, concealment, and endurance as everyday tactics rather than exceptional events.

2.2.2.5 Schallegger, play, and the threshold of reality

One of the most conceptually complex dimensions of Shehadeh's work is the role-play of Israeli officers by Palestinian players. These players enact protocols of control, including policing protests, making arrests, and conducting military operations, while adhering to mundane rules such as traffic laws. The deliberate performance of authority introduces adversarial play into the virtual world, producing a layered negotiation of identity and power.

Game philosopher René Reinhold Schallegger argues that when play invades primary reality, it ceases to be play and becomes ideological or political manipulation designed to restrict freedom of choice (Schallegger 2018). His warning is grounded in the concern that games may naturalise power structures when their logics are imposed upon lived experience. However, Shehadeh's work complicates this position. For Palestinians, whose primary reality is already saturated by colonial control, the invasion of reality into play is unavoidable. The game becomes a space where domination is exposed, rehearsed, and critically examined rather than passively absorbed.

By role-playing Israeli officers, Palestinian players negotiate their own positionality in relation to the systems governing their lives. This inversion does not collapse play into ideological control, but reclaims it as a site of agency. The rehearsal does not discipline players into submission but allows them to test, understand, and collectively reflect upon structures of power. In this sense, play functions as a critical pedagogy, fostering shared knowledge and strategies for survival through simulation.

2.2.2.6 Digital floating homelands and collective resistance

Shehadeh frames these modded environments as a “digital floating homeland”, a space where movement, joy, and resistance can be enacted without lethal consequence. The GTA V Palestine server enables acts that are impossible in lived reality: unrestricted travel, aerial movement, public celebration, and the regeneration of bodies and objects after damage or death. A car emblazoned with Arabic text races through urban landscapes resembling Ramallah or Nablus, while motorcyclists perform acrobatic stunts. These moments of exuberance stand in stark contrast to the dominant circulation of Palestinian suffering within global media.

The refusal to cross a virtual checkpoint, despite the absence of physical danger, underscores the persistence of psychological and political boundaries even within simulated freedom. The game does not erase colonial reality but renders its constraints visible through choice and refusal.

2.2.2.7 Virtual world-building as contemporary resistance

Shehadeh's work resonates with broader practices of resistance within virtual world-building platforms. Across different contexts, marginalised communities have repurposed games as sites of political expression and collective memory. Modding communities in The Sims have introduced trans-inclusive identities and anti-normative aesthetics. Young users of Roblox and Minecraft have organised protests, memorials, and political discussions, including widespread demonstrations in support of Palestine during the 2023 bombardment of Gaza. Syrian players have reconstructed destroyed heritage sites in Minecraft as acts of digital preservation, while corporate platforms such as NBA 2 K have temporarily incorporated political messaging, revealing the contested nature of virtual spaces.

Within this expanded field, Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another—Rehearsal positions immersive media as a terrain of struggle rather than escape. By foregrounding rehearsal, role-play, and modification, Shehadeh articulates a conceptual framework in which virtual worlds become laboratories for imagining collective futures under conditions of constraint. Immersion, in this sense, is not a withdrawal from reality but a method for engaging it otherwise.

2.2.3 Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme—may amnesia never kiss US on the mouth: immersive participation and collective witnessing

Basel Abbas and and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are Palestinian artists whose collaborative practice investigates sound, moving image, performance, and digital circulation as forms of political appearance and historical transmission. May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth (2015–ongoing) is a multi-format project spanning online platforms, live performance, gallery installation, and multi-channel video environments. Drawing from found online recordings of song, dance, and everyday cultural expression from Palestine and the wider region, the work constructs immersive archival spaces in which fragmented media circulate across screens, bodies, and temporalities. The project foregrounds participation, repetition, and collective witnessing as strategies for resisting historical erasure, repositioning immersive media as a living and unstable archive rather than a fixed repository of memory (Abbas and Abou-Rahme 2022). Exhibition texts and institutional materials referenced in this section are used to contextualise the project's evolving public presentation across museum and performance settings.

2.2.3.1 Immersive media and the politics of witnessing

May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth is an ongoing, multi-form project by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme that unfolds across an online platform, gallery installations, and public performances. Developed over nearly a decade, the work examines how experiences of violence, displacement, and forced migration are witnessed, narrated, and transmitted through embodied performance. Immersive media here is not employed to produce a seamless or totalising environment, but to foreground fragmentation, instability, and repetition as defining conditions of contemporary memory.

Immersion in this project operates through multiplicity rather than enclosure. Viewers encounter overlapping sound, image, text, and movement across multi-screen installations and interactive digital interfaces. This mode of engagement resists linear spectatorship and instead situates the viewer within a shifting field of partial encounters. Immersive media thus functions as a temporal and relational condition, one that mirrors the precarious continuity of lived experience under conditions of ongoing violence and erasure.

2.2.3.2 Performance as material witness

The project originates in an archive of online recordings of unknown individuals, largely from Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, performing through song, music, and dance. These recordings take place in domestic interiors, on streets, at weddings, on beaches, or in moments of temporary refuge. Abbas and Abou-Rahme treat these gestures not as ethnographic documents but as performative acts of bearing witness. Voice, rhythm, movement, and bodily presence emerge as political forms of inscription, registering histories of loss that often exceed verbal articulation.

These archival fragments become the basis for new performances developed in collaboration with musicians and a dancer in Palestine, including Makimakkuk, Haykal, Julmud, and Rima Baransai. Responding to specific sounds, gestures, and texts, the artists construct a recursive relationship between past and present performances. Through this process, the work repositions the body as a site of political becoming, where memory is enacted rather than merely represented. Performance operates as a material witness to the destruction of everyday life and, simultaneously, as a means of resisting erasure by reclaiming space, selfhood, and community.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme transform the body into a material witness, as defined by Susan Schuppli (2020). Schuppli argues that a material witness is an “operative agent” whose very substance “bears the mark of an event.” Here, the recordings of song and dance are not mere cultural artifacts; they are “technical and material systems” that record the friction between lived experience and political violence (Schuppli 2020).

By layering these archival fragments with new performances from artists like Makimakkuk and Haykal, the project activates what Schuppli (2020) calls the “expressive capacity of matter.” The voice and rhythm act as inscriptions that “testify to their own history,” registering the impact of displacement within the digital landscape. This immersion does not simply represent history; it creates a “forensic imagination” where the digital screen itself becomes a site of evidence (Schuppli 2020). The gestures of the performers are repositioned as “machinic ecologies” that archive the destruction of the everyday, transforming the digital landscape into a resistant territory where “memory is an active force” that refuses to be silenced by colonial erasure (Schuppli 2020).

2.2.3.3 Participatory counter-mapping and collective appearance

While May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth does not employ cartographic tools in a conventional sense, it nonetheless engages in a form of participatory counter-mapping. The appearance of uncounted bodies across digital feeds, links, and screens constitutes a spatial practice that challenges dominant regimes of visibility. By performing in public and private spaces and circulating these performances online, participants inscribe themselves into a dispersed yet interconnected territory of presence.

This counter-mapping is participatory in that it emerges from collective contribution rather than authorial imposition. The project assembles a geography of gestures, voices, and movements that cuts across national borders and temporal boundaries. Bodies congregate, disperse, and reappear, demanding to be seen and counted within and against systems that render them invisible. Material bodily presence becomes entangled with virtual afterlives, producing a hybrid space where appearance itself functions as a political claim.

2.2.3.4 Virtual afterlives and quasi-actual bodies

Abbas and Abou-Rahme conceptualise the figures within the project as quasi-actual and quasi-virtual actors, suspended between lived experience and mediated circulation. These figures inhabit a temporal condition marked by interruption and delay, reflecting the unfinished nature of the violence they endure. The project casts them as characters within an open script that thinks through the relationship between embodiment, performativity, and future time.

Virtual afterlives within the project are not presented as stable or redemptive. They are marked by the same precarity, instability, and potential disappearance as their material counterparts. Yet it is precisely within this instability that the work locates its political force. The repeated reappearance of bodies and voices across platforms resists the logic of finality that underpins both physical destruction and archival erasure.

2.2.3.5 Immersion, text, and fragmented narratives

Text functions as a critical component of the project's immersive structure, appearing across screens, performances, and online interfaces. Language is explicitly political, articulating relations of domination and resistance through statements that emphasise mutation, contamination, and negativity as sites where power unravels. These textual fragments shift according to the viewer's position and movement within the installation, producing divergent narrative pathways.

This spatialised reading experience diverts narrative coherence and reinforces immersion through disorientation. The multiscreen format ensures that no single vantage point offers total comprehension, reflecting the irreducible plurality of individual stories across time and space. Immersion here is not about absorption into a unified world, but about sustained exposure to difference, discontinuity, and simultaneity.

2.2.3.6 The poor image as counter-territory

The project's use of low-resolution, compressed, and often anonymous recordings directly engages Hito Steyerl's theorisation of the “poor image”. Steyerl describes the poor image as a degraded digital fragment stripped of high-fidelity value yet charged with political velocity due to its circulation outside official archives and commercial infrastructures (Steyerl 2009). These images, which Steyerl terms “the wretched of the screen”, carry the marks of displacement, loss, and unauthorised movement.

Abbas and Abou-Rahme operationalise the poor image by salvaging ephemeral recordings from the digital debris of social media. In May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth, these fragments are no longer signs of scarcity but foundational materials for an immersive counter-territory. Layered across multiple screens and sound channels, the poor image becomes a connective tissue that binds dispersed lives into a shared sensory field. The project transforms visual degradation into a strategy of endurance, refusing the erasure that accompanies both technological obsolescence and geopolitical violence.

2.2.3.7 Immersive resistance and the refusal of amnesia

By recontextualising poor images within an immersive environment, the artists grant their subjects renewed agency and temporal persistence. Immersion functions as a defensive architecture, sheltering collective memory from the forces of amnesia invoked in the project's title, which references Roberto Bolaño's Infrarealist Manifesto (1976) and is reinterpreted by Abbas and Abou-Rahme as a call against historical erasure (Bolaño 1976; Abbas and Abou-Rahme 2022). The digital realm becomes a site where memory is not preserved in static form but continually reactivated through performance, participation, and encounter.

Rather than offering resolution or closure, May Amnesia Never Kiss Us on the Mouth insists on ongoing attentiveness. It positions immersive media as a practice of resistance that reconstructs agency through collective appearance and shared vulnerability. In doing so, the project asserts that digital space can host a durable, resistant presence, one that confronts erasure not by denying fragmentation, but by inhabiting it.

2.2.4 Morehshin Allahyari—She who sees the unknown: Islamic aesthetics, myth, and digital resistance

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-born artist and researcher whose work engages digital technologies, feminist inquiry, and Islamicate mythologies to address colonial violence, cultural erasure, and gendered histories. She Who Sees the Unknown (2016–2019) is a research-based multimedia project incorporating three-dimensional modelling, digital archives, sculptural installation, and immersive virtual reality environments. Drawing on female and jinn-like figures from Middle Eastern folklore, the project uses speculative reconstruction to reactivate suppressed cosmologies and alternative epistemologies. Rather than employing immersion as a vehicle for seamless realism, Allahyari mobilises immersive media to foreground fragmented memory, embodied storytelling, and feminist world-building practices that challenge dominant historical and technological narratives (Allahyari 2019). References to artist interviews and project statements are treated here as contextual exhibition materials that clarify the conceptual and research dimensions of the work.

2.2.4.1 Refiguring myth through immersive research practice

She Who Sees the Unknown (2017–2021) is a research-based project by Morehshin Allahyari that mobilises immersive media, including three-dimensional simulation, sculpture, archiving, and virtual reality, to refigure monstrous female and queer figures drawn from Islamicate mythologies. Rather than approaching these figures as folkloric remnants, Allahyari treats them as epistemological agents through which histories of colonial violence, patriarchal control, and environmental catastrophe in the Middle East can be critically examined. The project positions myth not as a static inheritance but as a living archive capable of addressing contemporary conditions of erasure and trauma.

The work unfolds across multiple material and digital forms, reflecting a methodological commitment to fragmentation and multiplicity. Immersive media here functions not as technological spectacle but as a mode of relational storytelling that allows suppressed narratives to surface through layered encounters. By combining digital simulation with embodied installation, Allahyari situates the viewer within a field where memory, myth, and lived experience intersect.

2.2.4.2 Kabous, Jinn, and intergenerational trauma

A central component of the project is Kabous, a multimedia installation that addresses narratives of sisterhood, kinship, motherhood, and lineage. The term kabous, meaning nightmare in Arabic, Farsi, and Kurdish, refers to a spirit associated with sleep paralysis in West Asian traditions, often described as sitting on the chest of the sleeper. Allahyari reclaims this figure as a vehicle for articulating intergenerational trauma linked to war, displacement, and reproductive injustice.

The installation reconstructs the artist's childhood bedroom in Tehran and incorporates two suspended sculptural figures alongside a virtual reality experience. In the physical space, the viewer encounters two witness-like forms hanging from the ceiling, while within the virtual environment three mythic spirits emerge as companions to Kabous. These figures are not presented as threats but as interlocutors, guiding the viewer through overlapping personal and ancestral narratives.

The virtual reality component immerses the participant in a hammam, a traditional public bathhouse, where storytelling unfolds through embodied stillness rather than movement. The participant listens to Allahyari's mother reading diary entries from the period of pregnancy during the Iran–Iraq War, alongside a story recounted by Allahyari's grandmother involving an encounter with a jinn. These narratives converge with Allahyari's own speculative myth of a monstrous figure born of war and committed to breaking cycles of inherited trauma. Immersive storytelling here becomes a ritualised act of transmission, enabling trauma and mythology to be recirculated, reinterpreted, and transformed.

2.2.4.3 Immersive media and storytelling as ritual practice

In She Who Sees the Unknown, immersive media is deployed as a storytelling apparatus that privileges duration, intimacy, and embodied listening. Rather than situating the viewer as an active explorer, the work asks them to lie down, to listen, and to submit to a temporality shaped by voice and memory. This inversion of agency challenges dominant models of immersive media that emphasise interactivity, mastery, and control.

Storytelling operates as a ritual practice that binds personal testimony to collective myth. The immersive environment does not seek narrative resolution but fosters a cyclical engagement with memory, where stories return, overlap, and mutate. Immersion thus becomes a method for sustaining narrative continuity across generations, particularly in contexts where historical transmission has been disrupted by violence and displacement.

2.2.4.4 Laura marks and the Islamic genealogy of new media

Allahyari's practice strongly resonates with Laura Marks's theorisation of an Islamic genealogy of new media, which understands digital images as sites of enfoldment rather than transparency (Marks 2010). Marks argues that Islamic aesthetic traditions emphasise layering, pattern, repetition, and infinity, privileging haptic and contemplative modes of perception over perspectival dominance. In this framework, images do not reveal meaning through visual mastery but invite the viewer into a durational relationship in which meaning unfolds gradually.

She Who Sees the Unknown extends this genealogy by embedding Islamicate visual logic within posthuman digital environments. The representation of jinn and monstrous figures operates as an act of unfolding suppressed cosmologies from within the digital medium itself. Rather than adopting Western visual paradigms that frame the monstrous as abject or threatening, Allahyari reclaims these figures as carriers of knowledge and care. This approach counters both Western Orientalist depictions of Islamic myth and conservative regional ideologies that have sought to suppress or sanitise such figures.

2.2.4.5 Islamicate art, heritage, and digital reanimation

The project also participates in a broader resurgence of Islamic art and heritage practices that engage digital technologies as tools of reclamation rather than preservation alone. In contrast to institutional heritage frameworks that often fossilise Islamic culture as historical artefact, Allahyari's work reanimates myth as a living, evolving system. Digital modelling and simulation allow these figures to circulate beyond geographic and institutional boundaries, asserting their relevance within contemporary global networks.

This reanimation aligns with Marks's claim that Islamic aesthetics resist closure and containment. The digital rendering of jinn and monstrous entities does not stabilise their meaning but preserves their multiplicity and ambiguity. Heritage, in this sense, is not a fixed inheritance but a dynamic field of negotiation shaped by affect, memory, and imagination.

2.2.4.6 Immersion, infinity, and resistant visuality

Marks further argues that Islamic visual traditions privilege infinity and repetition, producing systems that resist instrumental vision and visual domination (Marks 2010). Allahyari's immersive environments echo this logic by refusing singular viewpoints and stable ontologies. Figures emerge through layered interaction, sound, and temporal sequencing rather than frontal display. The digital space becomes an environment of continual becoming, where identities and cosmologies remain open-ended.

Within contemporary immersive media, this approach transforms digital space into a resistant terrain. Rather than reinforcing extractive or colonial modes of seeing, She Who Sees the Unknown mobilises immersion as a decolonial strategy. By foregrounding opacity, relationality, and affective engagement, the project asserts alternative epistemologies rooted in Islamic myth and feminist storytelling. Immersive media thus becomes a means of asserting the persistence of suppressed knowledge systems and imagining futures beyond colonial and patriarchal frameworks.

2.2.5 From counter-mapping to worlding: immersive media as decolonial practice

Taken together, the practices examined in this section demonstrate that immersive media functions not as a singular aesthetic or technological category, but as a constellation of decolonial operations that unfold progressively across different registers of space, participation, and memory. Rather than accumulating examples of similar artistic strategies, the works by AlSalah, Shehadeh, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, and Allahyari articulate a sequence of interrelated interventions that move from the exposure of colonial infrastructures toward the construction of alternative worlds and ethical relations. This progression clarifies how immersive technologies are mobilized within diasporic West Asian art not merely to represent loss, but to enact forms of resistance, rehearsal, and collective becoming.

Recent geographical scholarship strengthens the shift articulated in this section from counter-mapping as oppositional representation toward counter-mapping as a process of worlding. In their conclusion to Counter-mapping as praxis: Participation, pedagogy, and creativity, Duggan and Gutiérrez-Ujaque (2025) reconceptualise counter-mapping as a mediating, onto-epistemic praxis that operates between individuals and society, between representation and transformation, and between knowledge and power. Rather than treating counter-mapping as a methodological tool for producing alternative spatial images, they position it as a critical and creative process through which spatial knowledge is continuously produced, contested, and reimagined. Central to this praxis are the interwoven forces of participation, pedagogy, and creativity, which together animate counter-mapping's political potential by foregrounding situated learning, relational engagement, and experimental spatial practice. Crucially, Duggan and Gutiérrez-Ujaque insist that counter-mapping must be understood as a deeply political and unstable terrain, shaped by persistent cartographic violence, algorithmic surveillance, and platform-based spatial control, and therefore always vulnerable to co-option, contradiction, and failure. This understanding resonates strongly with immersive digital storytelling practices examined here, where world-building unfolds within proprietary infrastructures and contested platforms, yet nevertheless enables forms of collective rehearsal, ethical engagement, and speculative reworlding. Read through this lens, immersive counter-mapping does not promise a decolonial commons free of power, but operates instead as a fragile and negotiated praxis through which alternative spatial relations and futures are provisionally enacted (Duggan and Gutiérrez-Ujaque 2025).

2.3 Ethics of immersive media and storytelling in the metaverse

2.3.1 Immersion, agency, and the metaverse as an ethical-political terrain

The expansion of immersive media into what is commonly described as the metaverse has generated renewed ethical debate concerning agency, embodiment, and power within digitally mediated environments. While dominant critical discourse frequently frames the metaverse as an extension of extractive capitalism, surveillance infrastructures, and corporate enclosure, recent philosophical interventions suggest that its primary ethical stakes lie not in its perceived unreality but in the ways value, meaning, and harm are distributed across virtual and material domains. Munn and Weijers argue that the ethical problem of the metaverse is not that experiences within it are fictive or inconsequential, but that they increasingly shape primary reality through affective, economic, and political feedback loops (Munn and Weijers 2023). This position is crucial for understanding immersive media as a site of decolonial practice rather than escapist simulation.

From a decolonial perspective, the metaverse must be understood as a contested terrain in which colonial power relations are both reproduced and resisted. Technologies that enable immersion, spatial simulation, and networked presence have historically been aligned with military training, border surveillance, and cartographic domination. However, as demonstrated across the case studies examined in this article, artists working from diasporic, postcolonial, and Global South contexts strategically reappropriate these same infrastructures to produce counter-maps, speculative archives, and alternative spatial imaginaries. Ethical evaluation must therefore attend not only to questions of harm and manipulation, but also to questions of epistemic justice, historical redress, and collective agency.

Munn and Weijers caution that immersive environments risk undermining autonomy when they are designed to subtly shape users’ values, desires, and behaviours without transparent consent (2023). This concern resonates strongly within metaverse platforms dominated by corporate governance and algorithmic optimisation. Yet the works discussed in this study demonstrate an alternative ethical orientation, in which immersion is mobilised to expand rather than constrain agency. In these artistic practices, immersive storytelling does not function as a mechanism of behavioural capture but as a means of collective sense-making and rehearsal.

Counter-mapping within immersive environments operates ethically by foregrounding situated knowledge and participatory engagement. Rather than imposing a singular, authoritative worldview, these projects construct fragmented, multi-perspectival spaces that require active navigation and interpretive labour from participants. In doing so, they resist the ethical risk identified by Munn and Weijers, whereby metaverse experiences become manipulative precisely because they appear seamless, totalising, and closed. Decolonial immersive works instead embrace opacity, incompleteness, and glitch as ethical strategies that preserve user autonomy and acknowledge historical rupture.

2.3.2 The ethics of representation and the poor image

Ethical questions of representation are further complicated by the circulation of low-resolution, unstable, and often anonymous digital materials within immersive environments. Drawing on Steyerl's theorisation of the “poor image,” immersive storytelling practices grounded in fragmented archives challenge conventional ethical frameworks that prioritise fidelity, authorship, and institutional validation (Steyerl 2009). The poor image, characterised by compression, loss, and circulation outside official channels, carries ethical force precisely because it resists commodification and archival capture.

Within immersive counter-mapping practices, the poor image becomes an ethical tool rather than a liability. By integrating degraded recordings, informal performances, and vernacular media into spatialised digital environments, artists refuse the hierarchies of visibility imposed by colonial and corporate archives. This refusal aligns with an ethics of care that values survival, testimony, and communal memory over aesthetic refinement or technological spectacle. Immersion, in this context, does not aestheticise suffering but situates the viewer within a fragile ecology of images whose instability mirrors the precarity of the lives they reference.

Finally, the ethical significance of immersive media in the metaverse must be assessed in relation to its capacity for world-making. Munn and Weijers emphasise that virtual environments are ethically consequential insofar as they influence how individuals understand themselves, others, and the possibilities of action in the world (2023). Decolonial immersive practices leverage this capacity by proposing alternative futures grounded in relationality, remembrance, and resistance.

Rather than offering escapist fantasies, these works function as ethical rehearsals that foreground responsibility to past and future communities. Immersive storytelling becomes a means of sustaining memory against erasure, testing modes of collective action, and imagining forms of belonging beyond territorial sovereignty. In this sense, the metaverse, when critically and ethically engaged, can operate as a provisional space for decolonial practice, where counter-mapping is not only spatial but moral, reorienting how value, agency, and historical accountability are distributed across digital and material worlds.

2.4 Immersion and XR in media studies

Within media studies, immersive technologies such as VR, XR, and interactive digital environments have increasingly been understood not simply as tools of simulation or entertainment, but as systems that shape perception, embodiment, and relations to space. Rather than defining immersion solely through sensory realism, contemporary media theory approaches immersive environments as cultural and ideological frameworks that organise how users experience presence, participation, and narrative engagement.

Janet Murray (1997) argues that digital environments produce immersion through procedural and participatory structures that allow users to navigate narrative worlds rather than passively observe them. This understanding shift immersion away from technological spectacle toward relational interaction and spatial storytelling. Similarly, Marie-Laure Ryan (2015) conceptualises immersion as a cognitive and narrative condition emerging through movement, navigation, and affective engagement with media environments. These approaches are particularly relevant to immersive artistic practices that foreground fragmented participation, unstable navigation, and contested forms of memory rather than seamless realism.

Critical media scholarship has also challenged assumptions that immersive technologies are neutral or universally emancipatory. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2016) argues that digital media systems operate through repetition, habit, and invisible infrastructures of control that shape subjectivity and social behaviour. Immersive environments therefore participate in broader technological regimes linked to surveillance, data extraction, and platform governance. In this context, immersive media cannot be separated from questions of political power, visibility, and access.

These debates provide an important framework for understanding the artistic practices examined in this article. Rather than using immersion to create coherent or totalising virtual worlds, the selected artists mobilise immersive media to interrupt dominant spatial narratives and expose the infrastructures through which colonial memory and representation are organised. Immersion, in this sense, functions less as a sensory effect than as a critical and spatial methodology through which viewers encounter fragmented histories, contested geographies, and alternative forms of collective presence.

2.5 Conclusion

This article has argued that immersive digital art practices function as critical forms of counter-mapping that intervene in dominant regimes of representation, history, and spatial control. Through a conceptual analysis of immersive works by Abbas and Abou-Rahme, Allahyari, AlSalah, and Shehadeh, the study has demonstrated that immersive media operates not as a neutral technological enhancement but as a political, ethical, and epistemic strategy. Across diverse platforms and formats, these artists repurpose technologies historically aligned with surveillance, simulation, and territorial domination into infrastructures for diasporic world-making and cultural resistance.

The findings indicate that immersive storytelling enables the transformation of fragmented archives, low-fidelity images, and embodied performance into forms of material and affective witnessing. Practices such as glitch aesthetics, participatory navigation, and mythic reanimation disrupt colonial visual economies that privilege clarity, coherence, and linear historiography. Abbas and Abou-Rahme's mobilisation of the poor image foregrounds circulation and repetition as modes of endurance, while Allahyari's immersive engagement with Islamicate myth reclaims suppressed cosmologies as sources of feminist and decolonial knowledge. AlSalah and Shehadeh further extend these strategies by exposing the colonial infrastructures embedded within digital cartography and game environments, revealing immersion itself as a site of struggle.

Crucially, these practices align with Laura Marks's articulation of an Islamic genealogy of new media, in which visuality is structured through enfoldment, opacity, and affect rather than transparency and mastery. Immersion, in this sense, facilitates a relational mode of engagement that resists Orientalist representation and destabilises homogenising narratives of the Middle East. Rather than offering immersive environments as sites of escape or resolution, these works insist on incompleteness, rehearsal, and ethical responsibility as central to decolonial practice.

The article has also shown that the ethical stakes of immersive media, particularly within metaverse discourses, cannot be reduced to questions of virtuality or illusion. Instead, immersive environments must be understood as consequential spaces where values, memories, and political imaginaries are actively shaped. When critically engaged, immersive media can function as provisional commons for counter-mapping, collective appearance, and future-oriented rehearsal. They do not resolve historical trauma but sustain conditions under which memory, resistance, and alternative cosmologies can persist.

By framing immersion as a methodological condition rather than a sensory effect, this study contributes to broader debates on digital culture, decolonial aesthetics, and media ethics. It suggests that immersive media holds particular significance for artists and communities navigating displacement, violence, and epistemic erasure, offering not a promise of technological redemption but a durable space for witnessing, relationality, and collective survival.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Camille C. Baker, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Ewa Lukaszyk, University of Ostrava, Czechia

Dipima Buragohain, Guangdong University of Petrochemical Technology, China