E-cologies part 1: The in-terra-net
BY ALIS OLDFIELD
When we talk of the internet, we often adopt spatial metaphors to discuss sites or domains, and our navigation between them as visits affected by traffic. If we imagine the shape of the internet, we might see maps of interconnected lines and dots, perhaps even stretched across a webbed globe. 🌐
Zooming in on that networked world, we see a complex uneven net. Users’ travel between sites leaves tracks like planes’ contrails in the sky. These interlocking paths form a mesh, a skin that binds virtual destinations and forms the terrain of the net. Our mesh, the roadmap of internet traffic, is less varied and vibrant than it should be. Thanks to its infrastructural organisation (internet protocols) the network is not distributed evenly but arranged in hierarchical structures with servers enabling access to branching paths. The creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, with prescient observation, noted: “for all its decentralized growth, the Web has currently one centralized Achilles’ heel by which it can all be brought down or controlled” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999, 126). Berners-Lee explained that the domain name system (DNS) requires a tiered computer system by which a server holds the information about its dependent computers, and which is consulted for packets to find their intended end address. If you shut down a server, you shut down access to all computers that store their addresses on it. Having witnessed an operator error that indeed once blacked out a system, Berners-Lee remarked “[t]hat technical weakness is itself less of a concern than the social centralization that parallels it” (Berners-Lee and Fischetti 1999, 127). It is this architecture that has enabled the growth of internet shut-downs and surveillance.
Instead of forests, marshes, rainforests, ice caps and wetlands undulating across the surface of this digital terrain, we have oil fields, factory farmed livestock and intensive agriculture. Like its Earthly counterpart, the resources and infrastructure are owned by a few mega corporations. Eight companies control the vast majority of internet travel and internet wealth. These giants act as agricultural industrialisers, cropping the users for their data. By cultivating more accurate understandings of each of us, they are better able to sell to us and in turn moderate our needs and wants. Like a blight brought about by planting the same thing year on year, the internet’s soil is losing nutrients. A network that links thousands of cultures, languages, perspectives, histories and knowledges is fast becoming a homogenous corporate wasteland. Every interaction squeezed for its profit-making value. A decade of mono-culture has stripped the internet of its biodiversity and replenishing ecosystems. Is our digital creation doomed to repeat the same catastrophes of its Earthly sister? The in-terra-net’s vitality and future viability is threatened by corporate monoculture.
But there is more at stake than just the internet’s health - the fates of the on- and offline worlds are entwined. Not only does the infrastructure and energy use of the internet have a staggering ecological cost, but its increasing corporatisation limits meaningful interaction, the spread of vital anti-capitalist information and grassroots organisation that could mobilise the fight against climate catastrophe.
I will offer my practice, as an artist, as a tool to think about material languages and metaphorical actualisations of this idea. Working with machine knitting offers a way to visualise the histories of computation whilst also contributing to online cultures, in the communities of people who share expertise about a dying craft online.
Cross Purposes
The internet as landscape, or the in-terra-net, aims to use metaphor as a method to uncover and undermine the fictions that already consume and control us. Though fictions are vital for collaboration and flexible organisation, stories have come to accelerate climate catastrophe. Within late capitalism our myth world is built on collective hallucinations of property, ownership, governance, nationality, and law, so far removed from the fate of our Earthly host that those few with empires of vast wealth exist outside of the structures of accountability to it. Our fictions have become more important than the resources needed to sustain them. Our belief in a global market, of financial growth, of corporations and our manufactured needs have resulted in a reality where the future of the Amazon rainforest is less of a priority than the success of its corporate namesake.
Our ability to untangle our world fictions in order to weave new ones is dependent on recognising them in the first place. What we need are myths that challenge and undermine the prevailing ones. Ones that are not white, western, and capitalist - bent on growth and consumption. Where fiction can work as a method to reimagine our networked future. The networked technologies that have come to map the globe were informed by networks of a bodily kind. Nineteenth century scientists utilised analogies of nervous systems in the design of telegraph lines, which have tangible and conceptual force. Laura Otis asserts that “metaphors do not ‘express’ scientists’ ideas; they are the ideas” (Hayles 2017, 48). The patterns that we observe in the world around us are echoed in the infrastructure we build with the tools we hone. Because “it matters what worlds world worlds” (Haraway 2016, 12), what worlds we imagine new worlds with. What words we choose and what metaphors we (un)wittingly weave with.
It also matters what matter we use to create and talk about these worlds. What materials speak of and what stories they contain. Machine knitting is both network and culture. Not only is the surface of a knit a network in and of itself (of strings and knots) but it also has a curious history in early computation. Sadie Plant brings Ada Lovelace to life in Zeros + Ones, a sweeping account of computation and gender. Though Charles Babbage proposed the idea of the Difference Engine in 1837, it was Lovelace, a teenager, who saw the potential of a machine that could use if/then commands and store information in punched cards. Users could feed numbers from punched cards and conditional branching instructions about what to do with those numbers into Babbage’s machine. Lovelace imagined a computer that could modify its own instructions with memory, to become far more than a rote calculator. To prove it, Lovelace wrote what is often regarded as the first computer program in history, an algorithm with which the Analytical Engine would calculate the Bernoulli sequence of numbers. The analytic engine owed much to the Jacquard loom, which emerged in 1804 and revolutionised weaving by storing complex patterns into punched cards, an early binary form (hole or no hole). The Jacquard loom draws on centuries of histories in knitting, weaving, spinning and dyeing, in which women have always been central.
The history of women in the development of computation is a series of ellipses, omitted stories hidden in the … of coded information. From the all women team hired at Harvard Observatory as human computers to process years of data from their telescope (saving half the cost of hiring men), to the women at Bletchley Park intercepting enemy transmissions (yet largely excluded from the cryptanalysts hut, save for Joan Clarke, again paid less than her male counterparts), or the punch-card operators and later programmers at Eniac (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer); women have been largely ignored for their contribution to computation (David Alan Grier 2007). Ada Lovelace saw potential in the circle, the loop, the ellipse. She helped envision an ‘engine’ that would ‘back the cards according to certain laws, allowing repetition of the use of a card – meaning it didn’t have to run a linear script of cards but could retrieve its own information. The engine could circulate its data and change its instruction. Babbage poetically described this as “eating its own tail” (Plant 1997, 20). The ellipses of forgotten histories… a circle, a binary code in a punched card.
Brother KH-830
By machine knitting, I invoke these computational histories of network science, but I also reference culture. Culture in shared histories of folk craft; of skills passed from person to person whilst the technology ages and we resist inbuilt obsolescence. In 2020, as part of a commission from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery to make work in response to their (at the time) new open image archive, I imagined a rewilded internet, in which information was shared, access was free and data not monetised. Here the landscape of the internet we know lies in ruin. Relics of a sterile corporate network are consumed by data-fragment dust. Unable to survive in this industrialised desert, digital eco-systems dwindled and mono-culture gave way to blight. Here the cycle begins again, life finding a way to survive in a wasteland.
500 million years ago, in this world, towering pillars of lichen claimed land for the first time. The only living thing on an otherwise impenetrable terrain, the prototaxites, as we now call them, dissolved the rocks that hosted them to extract the nutrients within, creating soil in the process and paving the way for complex life (Hueber 2001). In my work, machine knitted virtual prototaxites take hold; mycelial exchange re-wilding and enriching the soil of the internet.
Rewilding ARP(L)ANET, 2020, Machine knitting, plastic piping & coloured lighting.
The prototaxites sculptures were made on a Brother KH-840 punch card knitting machine. The punch cards are 24 stitches wide, the design repeating across the width of a fabric. In order to interrupt the pattern and create visual ‘glitches’ that allude to the computational legacies of the process, I manually reversed the punch card by one row multiple times. The structure these sculptures sit within is reminiscent of an archaeological dig site, where the footprint of a dwelling, of a hearth, door or walls are revealed in the excavation. Often grid based, these are also akin to the blueprint of a motherboard and its regimented organisation. The material structure of this grid system uses transparent piping, a visual reminder of the material cost to cool data centres and servers by piping in cold water. Machine knitting bridges on- and offline spaces in both its networked surface and its influence on early computation. It is a craft of intergenerational knowledge and experience, both machine and culture, networked and hallowed.
Part 2 Teaser:
Next time, I consider what life online looks like and how it feeds into e-cology, proposing that our data might be water, leaving ‘streams’ in our wake and terraforming the landscape as a result. Looking to histories of water offers warnings about how data might be used as a weapon – citing examples of colonial strategy that dispossess people of vital access as a tool of control.
As one might knit up a sack, I aim to pull at threads of science philosophy to suggest that perhaps not only is everything connected but that there might be more in that webwork than we can ever truly understand. Biological science is finding resonances with indigenous wisdoms (long ignored) that demonstrate that ecosystems are connected, dependent and entangled. Pantheology, the idea of God as dispersed in the multiplicity of all things, warns us of a complexity and divinity that requires reverence and respect. By building the in-terra-net as a metaphorical landscape akin to our own, I want to question whether the God of all things is present in the network too. We are entangled with technology in ways we are yet to fully cognize. No longer is it simply a tool – technology has become unwieldy in and outside of our hands. In this essay I am to invoke fears and awe in order to be more-than-careful of a vital and animated network, full of life and charged with divinity.
Alis Oldfield is a lecturer and artist, currently working on a PhD at Northumbria. As an artist, her practice is inherently multidisciplinary, using varying means to immerse the viewer in constructed worlds. Her research interests include data, water and pantheism.
