# Afterword *Net Works* is a body of work that came from exploring my local environment, and lead to reflecting on my relationship with technology. Through it and this accompanying document, I have tried to show how digital media and telecommunications technology in particular are entangled with space, environments and their inhabitants. The artwork in this series seeks to create opportunities for interaction and embodied experiences of these opaque, inaccessible or abstracted systems, for gallery visitors. This work has a lifetime – like the telegraph cables before, the Internet and connected systems looked at in this thesis will be superseded by the media dreams of today. Technology develops at a breakneck speed, and particularly in this current moment with the development of generative AI and its data and energy needs, likely to result in more hyperscale data centres, more underwater cables, and more demand on water, energy and material resources.[^1] At a personal level, we've seen how our desire to connect with others through these systems is used to keep us in online ecosystems that can become predatory. Rather than twisting ourselves further into these traps, I want to rethink and reimagine my relationship to be one that keeps the sense of abundance in opportunities for connection to people and ideas, while maintaining agency in movement and care for the real-world impacts of using these systems. For me, studying the eel, its life and environments, has guided my attention and observance. The research becomes a practice of correspondence[^2] with them as nonhumans, alongside the Internet and the artworks as nonhuman, too. Timothy Morton writes: > There is no good reason to distinguish between nonhumans that are 'natural' and ones that are 'artificial', by which we mean made by humans. It just becomes too difficult to sustain such distinctions. Since, therefore, an artwork is itself a nonhuman being, this solidarity in the artistic realm is already solidarity with nonhumans, whether or not art is explicitly ecological. Ecologically explicit art is simply art that brings this solidarity with the nonhuman to the foreground. – [[../references/Timothy Morton - All Art is Ecological#^bcb947|Timothy Morton - All Art is Ecological (2021)]] p.57-58 By weaving with the connections between the network as a trap and vessel, and the eel and water as medium and environment, *Net Works* tries to reveal how we are already bound together in relationship with everything else in the meshwork. --- [^1]: [[../references/Tech Won't Save Us - Data Vampires|Tech Won't Save Us - Data Vampires (2024)]] [^2]: "The things we study begin to tell us how to observe. In allowing ourselves into their presence rather than holding them at arm’s length, in attending to them, we find that they are also guiding our attention…Research, then, becomes a practice of correspondence." – [[../references/Tim Ingold - Anthropology Between Art and Science#^c9f8cb|Tim Ingold - Anthropology Between Art and Science (2018)]] p.15-16