This study aimed to examine and analyze the temporal experience in two prominent digital installations, Doug Aitken’s I’m in You and Random International’s Rain Room, seeking answers to three central questions: (1) how temporal structures are represented within these installations, (2) how the audience contributes to the formation and modulation of temporal experience, and (3) how these experiential modes relate to contemporary narrative theories. To address these questions, the research employed Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical model of mimesis alongside Marie-Laure Ryan’s theories of narrative, interactivity, and experiential narrativity. The methodological approach was grounded in qualitative analysis, focusing on the visual, auditory, spatial, and interactive elements that shape the viewer’s sensory and cognitive engagement with the works. The findings indicate that in both installations, temporal experience does not emerge through traditional linear, sequential, or language-based frameworks; instead, it unfolds through nonlinear, multilayered structures that are activated and continually reshaped by audience participation and multisensory immersion. Within Ricoeur’s tripartite model, the initial phase of mimesis1 (prefiguration) is enacted through the audience’s first perceptual and affective encounter with the installation environment; mimesis2 (figuration) materializes in the interplay of multimedia components that generate fragmented, nonlinear, or open-ended narrative constellations; and mimesis3 (refiguration) arises as the audience synthesizes these encounters into a subjective, reflective, and often transformative interpretation of time. Complementing this, Ryan’s emphasis on embodied interaction, procedurality, and multi-layered narrativity illuminates how temporal experience is co-constructed through the participant’s physical presence, sensory feedback, and agency within the installation. Whereas I’m in You frames time primarily through memory, image layering, and perceptual displacement, Rain Room reconstructs time through bodily negotiation, responsive environmental cues, and the heightened awareness of an extended present.