Immersive Digital Arts As Experiential Learning: Practice-As-Research In Technology-Mediated Ecologies

This article examines how digital artistic practices, grounded in a Practice-as-Research (PaR) framework, have the potential to reconfigure epistemic, ecological and pedagogical paradigms in digital arts education. The study draws on a range of theoretical frameworks; collectively, these frameworks serve to position artistic practice as a generative mode of knowledge rather than a mere representational tool. The project was developed within the context of an undergraduate Digital Arts module, focusing on the 13 natural monuments of the Viana do Castelo Coastal Geopark. Through field immersion, audiovisual experimentation, and iterative reflection, students produced seventeen digital artworks that engaged the territory as an ecological, sensorial, and conceptual partner. The study demonstrates that digital technologies, when mobilised through embodied, site-specific creative processes, can foster ecological awareness and relational forms of learning that challenge technological determinism and standardised pedagogies. The resulting works operate as sensory cartographies that translate the geopark's geological and atmospheric qualities into immersive audiovisual experiences, thereby revealing the potential of digital media to expand perception and deepen environmental engagement. Pedagogically, the project foregrounds uncertainty, collaboration, and aesthetic risk, promoting a post-standardisation model of learning that resists neoliberal metrics and embraces situated, exploratory inquiry. The findings contribute to ongoing debates in digital arts education and Information Technologies in Education (ITE), proposing that PaR-based digital practices constitute powerful mediators for epistemic plurality, ecological consciousness, and transformative pedagogical innovation.