P04 - Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing

Researchers:

„The project investigates sensor-based co-operative media and data practices of precision agriculture and closed-loop sensing for the containment of animals. It thus makes a praxeological contribution to the media, technological and agricultural history of border practices in addition to the empirical analysis of their implementation.“

CRC 1187-Project-P04-2024.JPG — © CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation”

News

SFB dissertations honoured with the Dirlmeier Foundation Prize

Christoph Borbach (University Siegen) And Sarah Rüller (University Siegen)

We congratulate our members on being awarded the Dirlmeier Foundation Prize for their outstanding research work.

→ to the complete press release of the University of Siegen (only in German)

About the award ceremony

Recognising the achievements of young researchers is an essential concern for the University of Siegen. Several university prizes were awarded in a festive setting in November and February. In addition to the Dirlmeier Foundation’s sponsorship award to SFB members Christoph Borbach and Sarah Rüller, other graduates were honoured by the University of Siegen, the Olpe district, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce and the DAAD for their outstanding work and extraordinary commitment. The award winners came together with their families and friends, the award-giving institutions and the laudatory speakers at the new Student Service Centre in Siegen city centre.

‘Promoting young academics is a central component of the University of Siegen. I am delighted that we are able to honour outstanding work and young people for their commitment, interest and professional achievements,’ said University Rector Prof. Dr Stefanie Reese.

About the dissertations

Christoph Borbach: Delay – Media Histories, 1850-1950

→ available here (only in German)

In his dissertation Christoph Borbach examines delay, the propagation time of signals. Delay can be understood as a volatile actor with its own media history. Delay-based media such as sonography, sonar or radar have far-reaching implications for current media cultures. Historically, however, the datafication of environments and bodies as a function of transmission times first had to prove itself in practice. Christoph Borbach presents nine case studies of the early temporalization of spaces and bodies in contexts such as medicine, the postal service, the military, and computer technology. In doing so, he innovatively sheds light on the history of media, culture, knowledge, and practice of the actor delay—from the first media of remote sensing in the 19th century to infrastructures of processing big data in real time.

Sarah Rüller: Moving Beyond the WEIRD: Lessons from an Amazigh Community in Shaping Pluralistic Digital Futures

→ available here

In her dissertation Sarah Rüller critically examines the complexities of conducting Western digital research in non-Western contexts through an ethnographic case study in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. The study highlights challenges related to postcolonial power structures, extractivism, and the impact of technocapitalism, challenging dominant frameworks of development and sustainability. By exploring the intersection of digital technologies, literacy, and community participation, the research argues for a shift from ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) to ICT4R (Information and Communication Technologies for Recovery).

Through a participatory approach that integrates co-design, speculative design, and storytelling, the dissertation examines how local communities engage with digital infrastructures and navigate the tensions between digital inclusion, authenticity, and external exploitation. The study critically reflects on the role of human computer interaction (HCI) and design research in promoting ethically grounded, situated, and plural knowledge production. It also calls for a re-evaluation of academic research practices and urges a move towards more sustainable and community-driven methodologies. By advocating for multiliteracies and alternative epistemologies, the thesis contributes to shaping inclusive digital futures that respect local knowledge, agency, and cultural diversity.

About the researchers

Christoph Borbach is a researcher in the project P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing” at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation« His research interests include Media Theory & History, Media Praxeology & Epistemology, and Digital Media Cultures.

Sarah Rüller is a researcher in the project B04 “Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb” at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«. Her research interests include Ethnography in Human Computer Interaction, Intercultural Learning Settings and Community Cooperation and Innovation.

New issue of the research magazine future features the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation”

Under the title “Computer, how am I?”, the focus of the 6th issue of the research magazine future (in German and English) is on topics from the Collaborative Research Center (CRC).

→ Click here for the current issue

About the new issue

The new issue focus on the question what humans do with media and media do with us. Since 2016, the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen has been examining phenomena in digital society. This area is developing at a rapid pace. The researchers are increasingly focusing on sensor media and AI. They have found that machine and human sensory abilities are becoming increasingly intertwined.

Topics covered include:

Of humans and media (p. 4)

An article about the new research focus on AI and sensor media at the CRC.

From observer to actor. Today, algorithms in computer programs are autonomously making decisions (p. 11)

An article about the research in project B08 “Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy”.

Live news from war zone: Social media and messenger services supply news and images from Ukraine daily (p. 18)

An article about the research in P06 “War Sensing”.

Blurring the boundaries of private life: Living in a smart home (p. 25)

An article about the research in B06 “Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households”.

Virtual pasture boundaries: Sensors are keeping animals in their place (p. 33)

An article about the research in P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing”.

The research magazines frequents once every year since 2019 with a number of copies 3,500. All topics are discussed or determined together with the Research and Young Scientific Academics Commission, the Research Funding Unit and Prof. Dr. Thomas Mannel, the Prorector for Research and Junior Scientists. The main requirement for the decision is that it is cutting-edge research that is future-oriented. All issues are open-accessed.

Would you like to receive one or more print copies, for yourself, for national or international partners? You can order print copies via future@presse.uni-siegen.de. We will gladly add you to our subscription distribution list, free of charge, of course.

About the Collaborative Research Centre

The CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation is an interdisciplinary collaborative research centre consisting of 19 subprojects and more than 60 researchers from media studies, ethnology, sociology, computer science, linguistics, ubiquitous computing, science and technology studies, education, law and engineering.

The Collaborative Research Centre 1187 has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2016. The research centre studies digital media, which have emerged as cooperative tools, platforms and infrastructures on a broad front. In the first funding phase (2016-2019), the CRC focused on the relevance of social media and platforms, while the second phase (2020-2023) centered on data-intensive media and data practices. Phase 3 (2024-2027) inquires the interplay between sensor media and artificial intelligence.

Digital, data-intensive media have brought new challenges and potential dangers in the context of ubiquitous data processing of sensor technologies and semi-autonomously operating artificial intelligence (AI). Sensor media shape everyday practices in the smart home, collect environmental data, control semi-autonomous vehicles and, in the form of wearables, measure and quantify every aspect of our bodies. As a result, human decision-making is increasingly encroached upon by computerised infrastructures. In public debates, sensor media and AI are frequently criticised as threats to data sovereignty and human agency.

The CRC Media of Cooperation addresses and counters these developments and debates by focusing on the reciprocity of people, media, and environments: sensor media and AI intertwine bodies and data, media and environments, and human and non-human actors reciprocally but not symmetrically. In this field of tension, the CRC conducts basic digital research that mediates between past and present and shapes future digital media.

The CRC’s main location is at the University of Siegen. Further nodes in our research network are located at universities in Cologne, Hagen, Bochum, Frankfurt/Oder, Bonn, Constance, and Luxembourg. There are also close collaborations with renowned international scholars and research institutions in Chicago, Warwick, Basel, Waltham, and Lviv.

Official call for abstracts

“En/Countering Tracking: Resisting spatiotemporal media operations in computational culture”

A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies

Edited by Kathrin Friedrich and Sebastian Randerath

The deadline for submissions is September 15, 2024.

Tracking takes place ubiquitously and at different scales – from satellite-based wildlife tracking (Benson 2010) to automated monitoring of supply chain workers through radio-frequency identification (RFID) (Hayles 2009; Kanngieser 2013) and to ubiquitous self-surveillance through self-tracking apps (Lupton 2021). With the expansion of sensor-based geomedia as well as embodied computing, tracking also becomes a key media operation for environmental sensing or virtual reality experiences (Egliston and Carter 2022; Gabrys 2019). The computational logics of tracking result in new aesthetic and operational regimes that diminish sensory perception and privilege logics of calculation, which in turn co-constitute mobile forms of (non-)human action and tactical interventions (Crandall 2010; Hansen 2015).

Countering tracking has become a key form of resisting the logics of computational culture. Subversive encounters have emerged in recent years as counterpoints to the hegemonic logics of web infrastructures (Christl and Spiekermann 2016), platform labor (Heiland 2021) and racial capitalism (Russell and De Souza 2023). These attempts to counter tracking take forms that range from investigative visualizations (Fuller and Weizman 2021) or provoking glitches in tracking infrastructures (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022) to uncovering web-based tracking (Sharelab 2015), building counter-infrastructures for labor resistance (Qadri and D’Ignazio 2022), or using sensors and satellite images for critical investigations (Ballinger 2023; Boyd et al. 2018).

Countering tracking becomes a resistant media operation itself, disentangling hegemonic spatiotemporal regimes and their socio-political forces. These forms of countering tracking challenge existing theoretical approaches to the critical analysis of tracking and open up new perspectives on subversion and resistance in computational culture. How is countering tracking by means of tracking possible in different contexts and in relation to software, infrastructures and aesthetics?

We invite critical encounters through and of tracking, enabling new perspectives on computational infrastructures, software, (non-)human aesthetics and operative interactions, by means of theoretical reflections, critical making or activism. We aim at gathering submissions that 1) render existing tracking operations perceivable; 2) disrupt tracking infrastructures; or 3) operationalize tracking itself for resistance. The special issue invites theoretical, conceptual and performative approaches from fields such as media studies, visual studies, artistic research, sociology and critical geography to address the question of how tracking becomes a repressive, subversive or activistic media operation.

Topics and projects might include:

Inventive methods that repurpose tracking infrastructures, sensors, software and data to research computational culture
Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring the relations of en/countering tracking in computational culture
En/countering tracking in labor resistance and platform capitalisms
Critical theoretical conceptualization of tracking or countering for the study of computational culture
Critical explorations of the chronopolitics, timescapes and spatiotemporal regimes of tracking
Activist media, countersurveillance, tactical media, decolonial, (glitch) feminist and resistant epistemologies of tracking
En/countering relations between political economy, racialized capitalism and tracking
Visual cultures, (in-)visualities and aesthetics of en/countering tracking
En/countering tracking in media art and artistic activism

Schedule:

750-word abstracts should be emailed to en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de by September 15, 2024. Abstracts will be reviewed by the special issue editors and the Computational Culture editorial board.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by October 30, 2024 and invited to submit full manuscripts by March 1, 2025. These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to Computational Culture’s policies. Possible costs for proofreading incurred by the authors are not covered by the editors or the journal. There are no open access or processing charges for this special issue.

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

For the full CfA visit:

Any queries can be addressed to the special issue editors at: en_countering_tracking@uni-bonn.de

CRC granted funding for another four years

We are happy to announce the official start of the 3rd phase of our Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation. We warmly welcome all members!

About new projects

A special welcome goes out to our new projects and new project members! We are very pleased to have the following project join our team:

A07 – Industry of Personal Data, led by Max Becker (together with Marcus Burkhardt)

B09 – Bicycle Media: Analyses of a Cooperatively Moving Medium, led by Julia Bee

P04 – Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing, led by Kathrin Friedrich (together with Tristan Thielmann)

P05 – Social Interaction in Semi-Automated Road Traffic, led by Shadan Sadeghian and Kristof van Laerhoven

P06 – War Sensing, led by Migle Bareikyte

Ö – Public Relations: Researching and Designing Cooperatively, led by Julia Bee (together with Jutta Wiesemann and Martin Zillinger)

We look forward to our final four years of collaborative research, intensive fieldwork, methods development, interdisciplinary cooperation, and final publications. In the coming years, we will once again advance our agenda to explore the relation between sensing & sense-making and the cooperative accomplishment of sensory media and develop our take on sensory praxeology. At the same we can draw on eight years of experience of working on cooperation and working cooperatively.

As the DFG puts it in their acceptance letter:

“The third funding period promises a rich harvest phase and at the same time marks a new beginning and perspectives for further research beyond the Collaborative Research Center.” (translation).

Executive Summary

The subproject “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing” investigates collaborative processes of semi-autonomization in the field of precision farming based on sensor technologies from the perspective of media theory, media history, and media praxeology. Against the backdrop of current sociopolitical and ecological challenges in the agricultural sector, the subproject uses the example of digital herding to evaluate the question of how cooperative media practices of heterogeneous actors produce virtual geographic boundaries. For this purpose, an analysis of co-operation is employed to examine terrain-modeling boundary practices, their use-specific mediatic forms of interaction, and their implementation in the form of closed-loop sensing. The project therefore allows a reflection of the mediatic conditions and scope for action of a practice specific to agriculture that consolidates media-historical developments and has, so to speak, a sustainable effect on future developments in the field of agriculture and animal husbandry. A full understanding of the thematic field within media studies concerned with boundary objects and boundary practices that is intimately connected to this requires media-theoretical reflection, empirical-qualitative research in the field, and the historical-praxeological evaluation of its development. These share the aim of making current media and data practices of sensor-based digital fencing comprehensible as an emergent further development of previously analog techniques of terrain modeling as well as of media and boundary practices of fencing. For this purpose, the characteristics of virtual fencing identified as essential are subjected to a historical analysis that also takes the agricultural, praxeological, and socio-technical implications of mobile fencing into consideration.

In order to reflect the practice of mobile fencing in its geographical and socio-technical conditionality from the perspective of media studies, selected virtual fencing systems are empirically examined. The analysis covers the different contexts of emergence and use of current applications, including those of a socioeconomic nature, and shows which specific technologies and situative practices are associated with each of them. In addition, this study explores the practices of fencing, the media technologies of sensing, and the socio-technical practices of agricultural automation in order to distinguish the historical lines of development of virtual fencing. Moreover, the approaches grounded in media theory and media praxeology adopted by this study make it possible to additionally consider discarded concepts, tensions, and failed designs of cooperative sensing practices. This allows an understanding of how boundary objects are already contoured or discarded as such in the preliminary or early phase of technology developments.

Research Aims

Media-theoretical, praxeological and socio-technical analysis of the "boundary infrastructure" of Precision Livestock Farming, consisting of electronic animal collars, GPS, LoraWAN and cloud infrastructures as well as mobile cartographic media applications.

Thesis: The difference between physical geography, human geography and vital geography is dissolved by Virtual Fencing.

Against the backdrop of current socio-political and ecological challenges in the agricultural sector, P04 uses the example of digital herding to analyze

how geographical boundaries are created through the co-operative media practices of heterogeneous actors,
how practices of fencing, from barbed wire to electric fences to Virtual Fencing, have historically developed and collided.

Prinzip von Virtual Fencing mit der App eShepherd (© am.gallagher.com) — Principle of Virtual Fencing with the app eShepherd
(© am.gallagher.com)

Methods

The project aims to interweave historical praxeology and empirical analysis of recent sensor data practices using case studies of border modeling.

The project is methodologically oriented towards the further development of ANT and boundary object analysis.

The contemporary and historical analyses require a mix of methods from

Co-operation analysis
Field research and participant observation
Affordance and interface analysis
Image studies analyses
Media archaeology of closed-loop sensing
Archive research, oral history, re-enactment of agricultural automation

Temporary Wire Fence (© Fences, Gates and Bridges 1887) — Temporary Wire Fence
(© Fences, Gates and Bridges 1887)

Work Program

Mit dem Finger Tiere hüten (© Nofence AS: Innføring i Nofenceappen) — Interaction with app-based virtual fencing technology
(© Nofence AS: Innføring i Nofenceappen)

WP1 analyzes current sensor data practices in Precision Farming based on the three focal points of infrastructuring and intervention; interface and interaction; and sensing ecologies.

WP2 examines the history of fencing practices, taking into account the heterogeneity of historical cultural techniques. To this end, historical trajectories of a shared history of media, technology and agriculture will be traced.

Thus, WP2 will trace the history of agricultural technology as a socio-technical co-operative development of progressive automation, miniaturization, precision and smartness (including its counter-movements).

Based on the entanglement of physical, virtual and vital geographies analyzed in WP1 and reconstructed in WP2, WP3 will analytically redefine the co-operation and boundaries between bio- and geodiverse actors.

Publications

2023

Borbach, Christoph and Tristan Thielmann. 2023. “Chains of Co-operation in the 1940s: Working on the Air Situation Picture.” In Materiality of Cooperation, ed. Sebastian Gießmann, Tobias Röhl and Ronja Trischler, pp. 91-130. Wiesbaden: Springer.

2022

Friedrich, Kathrin. 2022. „Hüten per Fingerzeig. Mediale Zugewandtheit im Precision Livestock Farming“. In Automatisierte Zuwendung – Affektive Medien | Sensible Medien | Fürsorgende Medien (AugenBlick. Konstanzer Hefte zur Medienwissenschaft 85), ed. Bernd Bösel, pp. 27–36.
Thielmann, Tristan. 2022. “Environmental Conditioning: Mobile Geomedia and their Lines of Becoming in the Air, on Land, and on Water.” In New Media & Society 24(11): 2438–2467.

2021

Friedrich, Kathrin. 2021. „Im virtuellen Zaun – Umgebungen adaptiver Medien“. In Techno-ästhetische Perspektivierungen des Milieus, ed. Rebekka Ladewig and Angelika Seppi, pp. 243–249. Leipzig: Spector Books.
Friedrich, Kathrin and A. S. Aurora Hoel. 2021. „Operational analysis: A method for observing and analyzing digital media operations“. New Media & Society. DOI: 10.1177/146144482199(17.08.2022).

2019

Thielmann, Tristan. 2019. „Sensormedien: Eine medien- und praxistheoretische Annäherung.” In Working Paper Series Media of Cooperation 9 (Sep). DOI: 10.25819/ubsi/31.

2024

Borbach, Christoph, and Max Kanderske. 2024. “Counter-practices: Understanding sensor datafication through subversive action”. Dialogues on Digital Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2976864024130597.