Emerging Media Arts and Environmental Futures

In response to intensifying social-ecological challenges, sustainability science has increasingly turned to imagination and futuring practices to guide collective action toward desirable futures. While conventional methods such as scenario planning and quantitative modeling have advanced scientific foresight, they often fall short in engaging affective, cultural, and participatory dimensions critical for transformative change. This paper investigates how emerging media art - projects leveraging interactive and immersive technologies (XR), sensor-based systems, and generative storytelling and AI - conceptualizes engagement with environmental futures. Drawing on a performative approach to futuring, we analyze 78 emerging media art projects t. Our analysis examines how these projects position themselves discursively and what affordances they might offer for addressing recognized limitations in conventional futuring practice. Findings reveal six recurring affordances: embodied perspective-shifting, making invisible processes perceptible, situated augmentation of place, centering non-Western and Indigenous epistemologies, creating boundary objects for deliberation, and networked storytelling. These affordances demonstrate how artistic techniquesmobilize narrative immersion, embodied experience, and participatory design to render social-ecological imaginings tangible. Further, we discuss structural limitations in the field. Rather than offering emerging media art as a panacea, we argue for its considered integration into pluralistic futuring ecologies that combine analytic rigor, artistic imagination, and inclusive practice. This work contributes to emerging dialogues on the intersection of creative practice and environmental foresight proposing pathways for more affective, situated, and democratic futuring in sustainability science. Future empirical research is needed to assess whether these intended affordances translate into actual transformative impacts on participants’ understanding and action.