Artificial Nature

1. Definition

Artificial Nature denotes a state of being in which technological realities built by humans cease to remain external tools and become environmental conditions within which human sensation, cognition, judgment, relations, and action take place.

“Artificial” and “nature” are not contradictory here. Nature does not refer only to a primordial realm untouched by human hands. It also means an environment that operates as the ordinarily unnoticed background of action and conditions what forms of life are possible. Once digital networks, algorithms, data centers, platforms, and interfaces reach this level, they function not merely as artifacts but as an environment for human beings. Artificial Nature is therefore not a virtual space detached from reality, but a living environment in continual transformation through the entanglement of matter, data, human beings, and nonhuman actors.

2. Ontological necessity

Early accounts of Artificial Nature explained the constitution of technological environments by associating information, algorithms, UI, and UX with the four elements of nature. Analogy alone, however, cannot provide a sufficient ontological ground. A correspondence between water, fire, air, and earth and digital elements does not explain why the latter can be called “nature.” Recent research addresses this limitation by reformulating Artificial Nature through the dual structure of substrate and stratum.

3. The eight elements of substrate and stratum

The substrate consists of the ontological preconditions that allow Artificial Nature actually to exist and operate:

• matter
• energy
• data
• networks

Servers, semiconductors, minerals, electricity, heat, cables, data flows, and protocols belong to this level. Artificial Nature is not an immaterial illusion; it depends on material, thermodynamic, and electrical conditions. If power and cooling in a data center stop, neither the algorithms nor the user experience continues to exist.

The stratum is the level at which this substrate is organized into a technological order that humans can experience:

• information
• algorithms
• user interface (UI)
• user experience (UX)

If the substrate explains what technology exists upon, the stratum explains how that existence is organized as order and experience. The basic structure is therefore:

matter · energy · data · networks → information · algorithms · UI · UX → human experience

This relation must not be reduced to one-way technological determinism. Institutions, capital, labor, culture, regulation, and user practices mediate substrate and stratum, and human beings can modify and rearrange the environment.

4. Conceptual boundary

Artificial Nature differs from cyberspace. Cyberspace is easily understood as a virtual realm opposed to reality, whereas Artificial Nature refuses to separate material reality from digital environments.

Artificial Nature is also not identical with the Mechanocene:

Artificial Nature asks how technological reality is constituted.

The Mechanocene asks how the relation between that environment and human beings has changed.

Connected Research

• 2026A Study on the Ontology of Artificial Nature: The Four Elements of Base and Stratum현대문학이론연구 101 · DOI 10.22273/SMLT.101.4
• 2021Birth of Artificial Nature and the Humanities of CoexistenceThe Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology 7(4), 449–460 · DOI 10.17703/JCCT.2021.7.4.449
• 2021The Problems of Media Aesthetics in the Techedit Era (2): The Birth of Artificial Nature and the Transparency of Immersion인문콘텐츠 60, 151–170 · DOI 10.18658/humancon.2021.03.151

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