„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.“

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.