The conceptual paper examines flourishing in light of positions from cognition theory, creativity and happiness research, and algorithmic agency.

Resources for Flourishing Within Self-Image-Shaping Digital Environments is part of the artistic research project Flourishing.

The paper’s central argument is that flourishing provides a productive organizing concept for understanding self-image because flourishing is multidimensional, relational, embodied, culturally situated, and open-ended.

Drawing on 4E cognition, interdisciplinary research, relations between digital archives and algorithmic memory, the paper develops an Image–Experience–Algorithm model. The image level concerns forms of self-representation; the experience level concerns embodied, affective, cognitive, social, and existential responses; and the algorithmic level concerns systems that select, organize, preserve, transform, or generate representations. The model is used to argue that digital technologies may support flourishing when they expand agency, reflection, connection, creativity, and meaningful participation, but may constrain flourishing when they narrow self-understanding, intensify comparison, externalize authority over memory, or privilege standardized accounts of the good life. The paper offers a conceptual framework for interdisciplinary research capable of bringing psychology, neuroscience, cultural inquiry, and technology studies into dialogue. Its principal contribution is to reposition self-image research within a broader science and practice of flourishing, in which the important question is not whether the self can or shall be represented, but whether representational practices help people and communities develop lives characterized by meaning, purpose, relationships, agency, health, creativity, and the possibility of becoming otherwise.