Materiality, Narratives, and Ethics of Living Systems Modeling: Ambiguities and Perspectives
(2025) Cohability : Ecologies and Technologies of Living on Earth — Location: Prague (8.October.2025)
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- Abstract
- Contemporary projects aimed at modelling living systems, particularly through the Internet of Animals and the use of connected chips for tracking wildlife movements and behaviours, are part of the modern project of elucidating and mastering nature. This presentation seeks to interrogate the materiality of these technologies, the narratives that accompany them, and, above all, the zones of ethical ambiguity they open up in our relationships with non-human living beings. On the one hand, these technologies promise to significantly expand our knowledge: they facilitate the prevention of zoonotic diseases and natural disasters and support conservation efforts, such as the reintroduction of raptors in southern France, which I have studied. These systems contribute significantly to the rise of movement ecology, which has the beneficial effect of challenging overly simplistic associations between species and their environments (Nathan & Giuggioli 2013). However, these devices are also embedded in a broader logic of controlling life, inherited from systemic thinking and Cartesian reductionism. This approach, critiqued by Derrida (2008: 44) as an “alteration [...] in the being-with that humans share with what they persist in calling the animal,” questions the boundaries between care, surveillance, and instrumentalization. The explicit ambition of these projects to uncover the secret behaviors of animals and to monitor wildlife seems to align with a geo-constructivist desire to control the systems that make our planet livable (Neyrat 2019; Zhang 2020). The narratives accompanying these innovations, often centered on pioneering researchers like the German Martin Wikelski, contribute to a mythology of progress where technology is equated with ecological salvation—a theme prevalent in environmentalist discourses and conservation project narratives. Moreover, the applications of these technologies extend far beyond conservation: the massive collection of behavioral data and the development of these technologies can serve a broader political economy, potentially paving the way for new forms of exploitation or commodification of living beings (Büscher et al. 2014). This presentation will outline my research directions on this topic, which will lead me to conduct fieldwork directly with the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the ARGOS project in France, which I have already begun to study. To explore the ethical ambiguities in depth, I will examine debates surrounding the notion of the animal-machine, particularly perspectives that complicate this often overly simplistically criticized concept (Agamben 2003; Derrida 2008). Regarding the use of chips in conservation, I will explore resonances with the literature on rewilding, a movement rich in imaginaries and narratives but offering a wide range of interpretations concerning its compatibility with capitalism and technology (De Vroey 2023; Jørgensen 2015; Lorimer & Driessen 2016). Rather than deciding on the acceptability or dangers of these devices, the aim is to highlight avenues for exploring the plurality of their uses and effects and to question the conditions for cohabitability with the techno-ecological trouble, as proposed by Donna Haraway (2015) and Bernard Stiegler through the concept of the pharmakon, where technology is both remedy and poison (Stiegler 2020).
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Gane, A. (2025). Materiality, Narratives, and Ethics of Living Systems Modeling: Ambiguities and Perspectives. Cohability : Ecologies and Technologies of Living on Earth, Prague.