Thinking with the Animal-Hacker

Articulation in Ecologies of Earth Observation

Abstract

In the depths of the Cumbria hills a dairy cow changes its route to stare deep into the camera lens of the ‘Environmental Virtual Observatory’ (EVO) (www.evo-uk.org). Downstream at 15 minute intervals organic matter is pushed through turbidity probes, sometimes causing the computation to glitch and upload its own movement into a data storage warehouse. In this muddy, messy situation of the EVO there is something lurking, something which might be described as the ‘Animal-Hacker’ the non-human animal, an entity that exploits the computational ecology, reconfigures it in an act of what Donna Haraway would describe as “worlding”.