Penjing World: Animist Urban Landscapes

Penjing World reimagines the Chinese art of miniature landscape cultivation as an immersive computational cosmos. Traditional penjing compresses landscape, time, and philosophy into a living miniature. Penjing World inverts that gesture: the viewer no longer holds the world in their hand, they enter it. Participants move through a cinematic sequence of layered landscapes, scanned penjing forms, and shifting volumetric environments. Rather than using spatial capture for realism, the project treats unstable media as a living environment shaped by movement, scale, and sound. Audio continuously animates atmosphere, density, and form, turning space into a responsive field. Drawing from animist traditions in which trees, stones, and weather possess presence, the work asks how emerging spatial media might restore relational ways of perceiving environment. Penjing World proposes digital landscapes not as images to consume, but as entities to encounter, negotiate with, and care for. Medium: Gaussian Splatting Platform: Unreal Engine + Touchdesigner Project Info: https://carlosnavarro.io/penjing-world