Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros15Décentrer les mondes numériquesPænser in interfaces: digital eco...

Décentrer les mondes numériques

Pænser in interfaces: digital ecotones and techno-animist practices in wildlife monitoring systems

Margaux Crinon
Traduction de Laurence Besnard-Scott
Cet article est une traduction de :
Pænser en interfaces : écotones numériques et pratiques techno-animistes dans les dispositifs de suivi de la faune sauvage [fr]

Résumé

How do digital video capturing devices transform our relation to natural worlds and the animals that establish them? This article explores this question through a study of wildlife monitoring systems in the cross-border forest massif of the Natural Parc of Vosges du Nord (France) and the Pfälzerwald Natural Park (Germany). Drawing upon the concept of ecotone—ecological transition zone—as theoretical model to reflect on digital interfaces, we analyze how these systems create relational spaces that fall outside the scope of the naturalist observation from which they are derived. From two bio-socio-technical assemblages (like a lynx fitted with a GPS collar or storks monitored by biologgers and tracking cameras), we examine the emergence of techno-animist practices within mixed communities, made of field professionals and anonymous online enthusiasts. The tension between panser [to heal] (taking care of) and penser [to think] (monitoring) that is encapsulated in the neologism pænser reveals the ambivalence intrinsic to these systems, between ethics of care and logic of control.

Haut de page

Notes de l’auteur

To Jane Goodall,

who chose names instead of numbers

and made empathy enter the observation process.

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 We borrow the term “establish” [instituer] from various sources: Latour (2005), for whom non-human (...)

1How do digital video capturing devices transform our relation to natural worlds and the animals that establish them?1 At the crossroad of socio-ecological matters and technology-related issues, this question aims to clarify the role of new forms of digital mediation in our relation to animal alterity. Far from being a homogeneous group, digital practices need to be tackled through field analysis to reveal the specific ways in which we establish relations with animal alterity.

  • 2 An ecotone is a term mainly used in ecology and landscape ecology to designate a transition between (...)

2Our research explores how wildlife video capturing devices contribute, as transformative actors, to the construction of a complex relational ecology between human and non-human beings. Between 2024 and 2025, as part of a PhD thesis in Design at the University of Strasbourg, we conducted semi-directive interviews with both institutional actors (French Office of Biodiversity officers, Regional Natural Park staff, Bas-Rhin Hunting Federation representatives, Max Planck Institute researchers) and field practitioners (naturalists and trackers from the Wolf-Lynx Network who document wildlife presence), complemented by analysis of public documents (municipal FAQs, public consultation reports, educational materials). Our central hypothesis is that these digital interfaces function like ecotones,2 through which exchanges and evolutive relational forms operate and reconfigure our relation to wild animals, thereby impacting our imaginaries and political actions.

1. Digital ecotones: a conceptual framework to reflect on socio-ecological interfaces

3The concept of ecotone serves as a conceptual model to reflect on the digital technologies that act as interfaces between human worlds and natural worlds. An ecotone is characterized by its nature as tonos (“tension” in Greek): a liminal, dynamic and porous space where exchanges between different systems occur. One of its best-known examples is the forest edge; the water pool created by a beaver dam is another one. Crucially, ecotones are characterized by continuous evolution and constitute relational milieus where biodiversity exceeds that of adjacent environments—a key feature for understanding digital interfaces not as mere boundaries but as generative zones where new relational forms emerge. Applied to digital wildlife monitoring systems—encompassing GPS collars, biologgers, camera traps, thermal drones—this model allows us to conceptualize digital visual interfaces, data visualizations, and live video feeds not as mere representational tools but as active contact zones. As Tim Ingold notes (2013), we are dealing with processes of “correspondence” (from the Latin respondere, to respond with), through which human beings, animals and technical devices enter a relation of mutual adjustment. The equipped animal and the infrastructures following it co-construct each other: it is in the continuous interaction between the movements of the lynx Lycka, the systems capturing them and the actors interpreting them that a certain figure of the lynx progressively emerges, a figure that is simultaneously ecological, technical and social. The concept of ecotone also helps us to reflect on heterogeneous temporalities. Ecosystems operate according to slow rhythms (seasonal cycles, evolution) and digital systems according to fast temporalities (calculation, instantaneous transmission). This disjunction also creates tensions: the virality of a lynx image on social media stands in contradiction with the length of time necessary to understand its ecological movements, its multiplication through photographic reproduction even contrasting with the quasi-impossibility to see a real one with our own eyes.

2. From monitoring to sur-veillance: when care becomes control

4Surveillance designates this ambiguity of an initially protective watch that tends towards a total observation—an observation without any restraint nor distance. To analyze the way in which previously cited temporalities of visibilities reconfigure our relations to wild animals, we have selected two bio-socio-technical assemblages according to their degree of tension between animals, frequency of encounter and social expectation. English distinguishes between encounter (a fleeting crossing where one perceives the other without establishing relation) and meet (an existential co-presence where we truly exist for one another)—a nuance that French collapses into the single term rencontre. This linguistic difference illuminates what occurs in digital monitoring systems: we are closer to encounters than meetings, perceiving mediated traces while something relational emerges despite the absence of physical co-presence. In the digital devices that we study, we are more on the side of the encounter: we perceive mediated traces, but something along the lines of an affective relation is being woven despite the absence of physical co-presence.

5In what follows, two bio-socio-technical assemblages are analyzed in more detail according to the degree of tension they imply between animal temporality and social expectation, with a view to understanding the different aspects of their condition of visibility, as well as the resulting relational impacts.

2.1. Lycka: the spirit of the forest

  • 3 The Wolf-Lynx Network is responsible for the monitoring of wolf and lynx populations in France. For (...)
  • 4 See the site of the National Plan of Actions (PNA) for the Eurasian lynx: https://www.plan-actions- (...)

6Lycka, a female lynx reintroduced in Germany in 2020, has established her territory in France. She was fitted with a GPS collar emitting one to two signals per day. Her collar being now dysfunctional (the battery lasts only two years), her monitoring relies on the mixed Wolf-Lynx Network3 which itself depends on the contributions from field professionals, volunteers, camera traps and collation of evidences of her presence. This digital ecotone functions via pulsations, like the daily tides flooding the beach and, as they ebb, leaving behind traces of their rising in the sand. This daily pulsation has left more slowly paced traces, thereby producing an intermittent relation thanks to which the animal was able to maintain space-times of invisibility. Her favourite territories being in white zones, at the bottom of the forest valley, the emitted signals were more and more spaced out, preparing the naturalists’ teams for the impending end of this tracking mode. The researchers from the PNA Lynx4 admitted that it was hard for them to imagine that the signal would stop, so used to it they were. Moreover, due to the dysfunctionality of the device, along with the constraints of the territory, signals would intermittently reappear, reviving the teams’ hopes after several weeks that the monitoring could have lasted longer than what the battery could offer.

  • 5 See the site of the Regional Natural Park of Vosges du Nord (PNRVN): https://www.parc-vosges-nord.f
  • 6 Translator’s note: French Office of Biodiversity (OFB).

7Enabled by scientific monitoring, Lycka’s digital presence generates public reactions documented by field professionals. Sandrine Farny, an officer at the PNRVN,5 and Marie-Laure Schwoerer, an officer at the OFB6 observe:

When Lycka is photographed, the image circulates immediately from smartphone to smartphone, from WhatsApp to Facebook groups, from village to village. We receive calls, people want to know if it is really her.

8An episode of intensification of visual attestation even led the mayor of Waldhambach to organize a public consultation to be able to respond to questions and concerns coming from the wider public and actors from the agriculture and hunting sectors. Also noteworthy is the fact that the Natural Park of Vosges du Nord relies on the presence of lynxes as emblematic, if not totemic, animal of this massif, both invisible to walkers but displayed as derived products or in numerous communication campaigns.

2.2. Mélodie, Maurice, Noé and Saulus: the birds community

9The camera placed next to the nest of storks Mélodie and Maurice, installed on the rooftop of Sarralbe’s town hall (Moselle, France), offers a continuous connection.7 Set up in 2017, it monitors this nest 24 hours a day, abolishing any temporal and spatial distance. According to the commune’s data, the site generates thousands of visitors per day during nesting. The commune’s FAQ section8 reveals the collective appropriation: more than thirty questions concern the identification of individual stork (“How can we recognize Maurice?”), their well-being (“Can the nest be protected with a parasol?”), and their breeding habits. The framing was modified because “Maurice was standing at the edge of the nest and his position meant that its head was off screen.” Dominique Klein, known locally as “Monsieur Cigogne [Mister Stork],” a former officer at the National Office of Forests (ONF), confirms: “People contact us as soon as they notice something unusual. It has become a collective surveillance.” Paradox: the commune has more than forty forks’ nests, creating local nuisances, while the media attention is focused only on one nest, thus giving the impression that there is only this pair in the village.

  • 9 Miniaturized satellite-based geolocation systems fitted to animals that record and transmit GPS coo (...)

10In parallel to this monitoring project, two other storks, Noé and Saulus, are followed by biologgers9 during their migrations. Wolfgang Fiedler from the Max-Planck Institute explains:

The GPS data show that some storks travel more than 12,000 kilometers. But what surprised us, beyond the discovery of strategies unique to each of them, is the interest shown by the anonymous wider public for equipped individual storks on the platform Animal Tracker. We regularly receive anonymous messages regarding animals they follow that may have an abnormal trajectory. Yet, it is only a dot on a map.

11This narrativization of data transforms the abstract nature of coordinates into a narrative that surpasses the visualization of data and clearly appeals to the affect, imagination and investigative ability of the wider public for wild animals. Tracking competencies have moved from one milieu to another one.

3. Techno-animist practices: ontological reconfigurations

12These technical protocols fall within what anthropologist Philippe Descola (2005) identifies as naturalism—one of four fundamental ontologies (alongside animism, totemism, and analogism) that structure human-nonhuman relations. Naturalism, dominant in Western science, assumes shared biological physicality but radically different interiorities between humans and animals. This dissociation justifies the observer/observed divide underpinning digital monitoring practices. Yet, the effects produced by the images and narratives arising from these systems surpass this framework. The emergence of techno-animist practices can be observed, through which internet users develop affective relations with specific animal individuals, knowing that no eye contact will be made.

13Lycka’s case is revealing. Protected by her legal status but recognizable by her collar, she becomes a social subject emerging from social networks. She develops a “personality”—first through the provision of a name, rather than a number—that surpasses her biological status to become a sort of “spirit of the forest,” mediated through technology. Sarralbe’s FAQ reveals an individualization of the storks: Mélodie and Maurice have a given name, physical characteristics (“Maurice has a longer beak”), an estimated age, and a reported conjugal story. The banding program planned to “baptize” the storklings. The municipal formulation “our and your storks” indicates a collective possession. As for biologger-equipped Noé and Saulus, their migratory movements testify to the species’ adaptive changes but, on an individual level, they become witnesses or messengers.

14These practices do not strictly correspond to classical animism—where, in Descola’s framework, humans and nonhumans share similar interiorities (souls, perspectives) but possess different physicalities (bodies). Rather, they constitute a hybrid form: animals remain biologically distinct from humans (maintaining naturalist difference) yet are attributed media-constructed subjectivities through technological mediation. Hence our term “techno-animism”—technology as operator enabling humans to project interiority onto equipped animals while maintaining ontological distance. The digital interface becomes an ontological operator that transforms our perception of wildlife. Through these systems, certain animal individuals acquire a status of socio-ecological mediums. As Sybille Krämer (2015) conceptualizes it, a medium is not a mere transparent channel: it is an active intermediary that transforms what it transmits. Lycka does not simply transmit information on the lynx territory: she materializes the relationship between the natural world and the human world. Her movements become messages on the possibilities of wildlife in anthropized territory as much as markers of the difficulties in encountering new fellow lynxes through a lack of ecological corridors. Digital monitoring brings before our very eyes our own frontiers and impasses, to which animals are confronted.

4. Pænser: between care and surveillance

  • 10 Translator’s note: panser in French also means to dress or bandage (a wound).

15The tension between panser [to heal]10 (take care of, watch over) and penser [to think] (monitor, establish) constitutes one of the ambivalences intrinsic to these systems. This technologically mediated visibility oscillates between ethics of care and logic of control. The work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) shows that the notion of care is not a mere affective disposition but involves material practices and being attentive to power relations. In our case studies, it manifests itself through the attention given to Lycka’s movements to protect her or through the concern for the forklings in case of bad weather.

16These practices create communities of concernment, through which members of the public feel responsible for individual animals they will probably never meet physically. Sarralbe’s FAQ reveals these tensions: “How can we recognize Maurice?,” “Why is there only 3 storklings left?,” “Is the camera in the way?.” These questions express a daily concerned attention. Faced with this affective surveillance, the municipality oscillates between calls to order (“Storks are wild animals”) and validation of collective care (“All staff members watch over our and your storks”).

17Sociologist Richie Nimmo (2016) has developed the concept of liminal intimacies to reflect on these forms of mediated relations. Referring to what is on the threshold, in an intermediary space, Nimmo defines liminality in terms of a paradox: while our physical proximity with certain animals increases, we simultaneously experience an existential separation from their alterity. The notion of liminal intimacy he proposes may then cultivate a proximity that deliberately maintains a respectful distance, through which alterity is preserved, thereby recognizing the autonomy of animals by striking a delicate balance between knowledge and mystery. We propose the neologism pænser not merely as analytical concept but as active practice—simultaneously verb, ethos, and mode of engagement—to maintain this productive tension between care and surveillance. This approach requires recognizing wild beings’ right to opacity—concretely, designing monitoring systems that deliberately maintain zones of intentional invisibility, temporal refuges where animals escape the technological gaze. This is not a technical limitation but an ethical commitment. As Donna Haraway (2008) suggested, it may mean transforming asymmetrical relationships into significant encounters, during which each participant retains the capacity to affect and be affected. Digital ecotones may therefore become spaces of political negotiation where agentivity is not solely the monopole of human and technical actors.

5. Towards attentive relational ecologies

18Digital ecotones show how technological interfaces form active spaces where the relationships between care and surveillance, visibility and invisibility are reconfigured. Our study demonstrates that these systems generate techno-animist practices, through which equipped animals acquire a status of socio-ecological mediums and become involuntary mediators between natural worlds and human worlds. This transformation creates a dialogue within established ontological frameworks, indicating the emergence of hybrid forms. However, these new relational modalities are still laden with power asymmetries. The tension between care and surveillance raises a crucial question: from what point does benevolent attention slide into control?

19Our research has certain limitations which need to be acknowledged: restricted geographical perimeter, indirect access to public reception. Further research could directly interview the “watchers” who monitor these animals daily. On a practical level, our analyses indicate the necessity to develop reflexive mediumistic practices. This would imply the creation of systems that preserve zones of opacity that are essential to alterity. Pænser in interfaces is recognizing that our relations to natural worlds are always already mediated, technologically as much as culturally, and that the challenge is not to eliminate these mediations, but to inhabit them consciously. If, as Peters (2015) writes, “the media are also agents of order,” then the order they instore in our relations to the living deserves to be collectively questioned. In a world marked by the erosion of biodiversity and the omnipresence of digital mediations, understanding these technologically mediated encounters constitutes not only a theoretical challenge, but also a social and political necessity.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Benson, E. (2010). Wired Wilderness. Technologies of Tracking and the Making of Modern Wildlife. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Centemeri, L. (2019). La permaculture ou l’art de réhabiliter. Quae.

Descola, P. (2005). Par-delà nature et culture. Gallimard.

Haraway, D. (2021). Quand les espèces se rencontrent. Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte.

Ingold, T., Gosselin, H., Afeissa, H.-S. (2017). Faire. Anthropologie, archéologie, art et architecture. Éditions Dehors.

Krämer, S., Enns, A. (2015). Medium, Messenger, Transmission. An Approach to Media Philosophy. Amsterdam University Press.

Latour, B. (2006). Changer de société. Refaire de la sociologie. La Découverte.

Morizot, B, Husky, S. (2024). Rendre l’eau à la terre. Alliances dans les rivières face au chaos climatique. Actes Sud.

Nimmo, R. (2016). “Substitutability and Liminality,” Environment and Planning E. Nature and Space.

Peters, J.D. (2015). The Marvelous Clouds. University of Chicago Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. University of Minnesota Press.

Star, S.L. (1999). “The ethnography of infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3).

Stépanoff, C. (2024). Attachements. Enquête sur nos liens au-delà de l’humain. La Découverte.

Haut de page

Notes

1 We borrow the term “establish” [instituer] from various sources: Latour (2005), for whom non-human actors establish socio-technical orders; Haraway (2008), for whom species mutually establish themselves in encounter; Descola (2005), for whom each ontology establishes a specific relational mode between humans and non-humans. Wild animals do not passively inhabit a preexisting world: they establish it through their practices and presences.

2 An ecotone is a term mainly used in ecology and landscape ecology to designate a transition between two ecosystems, such as a forest edge or a foreshore: it is an ecological in-between. Its extension to the field of humanities and social sciences has been explored in the study led by Centemeri (2019).

3 The Wolf-Lynx Network is responsible for the monitoring of wolf and lynx populations in France. For more information: https://ofb.gouv.fr/reseau-loup-lynx

4 See the site of the National Plan of Actions (PNA) for the Eurasian lynx: https://www.plan-actions-lynx.fr

5 See the site of the Regional Natural Park of Vosges du Nord (PNRVN): https://www.parc-vosges-nord.fr

6 Translator’s note: French Office of Biodiversity (OFB).

7 See the live webcam TV Stork of the commune of Sarralbe: https://www.sarralbe.fr/cigognes

8 See the FAQ section of Sarralbe concerning the storks: https://www.sarralbe.fr/les-cigognes

9 Miniaturized satellite-based geolocation systems fitted to animals that record and transmit GPS coordinates. The data are accessible via online platforms such as MoveBank which is overseen by the Max-Planck Institute.

10 Translator’s note: panser in French also means to dress or bandage (a wound).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Margaux Crinon, « Pænser in interfaces: digital ecotones and techno-animist practices in wildlife monitoring systems »Hybrid [En ligne], 15 | 2026, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2026, consulté le 21 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/6738 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/162zb

Haut de page

Auteur

Margaux Crinon

Margaux Crinon is an Associate Professor and interaction designer. She is currently a PhD candidate in Design at the University of Strasbourg (ACCRA, ED 520, Visual Cultures group) co-supervised by Vivien Philizot, Stefan Kristensen and Nolwenn Maudet. Her research, entitled “WWWired Wilderness,” questions digital wildlife monitoring systems and their impacts on our relations to animal alterity. Since 2015, she has been teaching in the Master program in Digital Environments and in the Higher Diploma in Applied Arts (DSAA) in Interactive Design.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search