We watch the seabed for hours at a time. The muddy sea bottom is punctuated with rocky outcrops or mountains of dead coral or cold seeps that form a lake in the underwater landscape. Mostly we’re watching for the life – the bamboo coral, black coral, sponges, jellies, squat lobsters, rattail fish, octopuses, and more – that the eye catches a glimpse of. We watch them interact with humans and each other as shrimp and squat lobsters guard their coral hosts, squid are attracted to the camera light, and fish scurry away from the churned-up sand.

Yet neither of us have ever gone deep sea diving; we are watching from the comforts of home via the live feed of the Okeanos Explorer. The ship was commissioned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2008 as a deep-sea research vessel with telepresence capabilities that allow scientists on shore to have real-time access to the remotely operated vehicle (ROV) feed and converse with the on-board personnel while also allowing the feed to be broadcast online. This means that when you watch the live feed from Okeanos Explorer, you are getting not only the images but also expert commentary on the biology, geology, chemistry, archaeology, and other aspects of the dive. It is an augmented view of underwater ecologies that is only available in the digital realm.

The limitation to the digital is key. As Stacy Alaimo has observed, ‘most aquatic zones, species, and topics exist beyond human domains, requiring the mediation of science and technology’.¹ While a Homo aquaticus has been proposed in science fiction (and to some extent even worked on by serious scientists),² humans are primarily a terrestrial species that can only encounter life underwater at limited depths and for limited times without high-tech interventions.

NOAA’s director of the Education Program at the time of its launch, Paula Keener-Chavis, wrote that Okeanos Explorer would enhance teaching ocean science to anyone. Okeanos Explorer was ‘the ship upon which learners of all ages embark together on scientific voyages of exploration to poorly known or unexplored areas of the global ocean’.³ It would mobilise ‘sophisticated technological capabilities that have made the ocean more “visible” and more accessible than ever before’.⁴ The public interest in seeing this deep unseen is large: each exploration cruise of the Okeanos Explorer gets hundreds of thousands of views of the live video on its YouTube channel.⁵

The digital ecologies of Okeanos Explorer, which are made visible to thousands of onlookers through digital interfaces, resonate with this essay collection. The editors have highlighted that investigating the materialities, encounters, and governance of digital ecologies helps researchers to understand the uneven geographies of the digital encounter. In reflecting upon the collection, we will argue that, even more fundamentally, these constellations of materialities, encounters, and governance make organisms, humans, and technology visible. Bruno Latour argued that modernity depends on immutable mobiles, which are objects which can not only move to other settings (i.e. they are mobile) but which also can be presented and read in the same way no matter where they move (i.e. they are immutable).⁶ Inscriptions of phenomena, whether in the form of mathematical equations, photographs, drawings, or textual descriptions, are immutable mobiles that allow others at a distance from the phenomenon to partake in it. The digital creates immutable mobile inscriptions which can facilitate seeing far away from the object of sight. It is through this digital visibility that more-than-human geographies can be constructed.

Making organisms visible

As much as the rock formations or even the patterns on the sand of the seabed might be interesting, to be honest, we are mostly fascinated by the organisms encountered by Okeanos Explorer. We have watched a crab voraciously eating a brittlestar and an armoured sea robin ‘walking’ on the rocks on small modified fins.⁷ The digital resolution of the ROV camera livestreaming video from hundreds or even thousands of feet underwater is amazing – individual coral polyps, hairs on crab legs, and starfish feet are all crystal clear. These are digital ecologies for making organisms visible.

Environmental humanities scholarship has stressed the need to investigate multispecies relations by being attentive to diverse ways of life.⁸ This kind of multispecies approach ‘focuses on the multitudes of lively agents that bring one another into being through entangled relations’ rather than just focusing on the relationship of humans to other species.⁹ It is an act of noticing to take time with a squat lobster in the branches of a Chrysogorgia octocoral and appreciate their lives on our shared planet. Likewise, listening to a group of disembodied voices belonging to a group of scientists scattered across the planet chatting to identify a mysterious siphonophore that you are all simultaneously watching on screens is also an act of noticing.

The lobster trap-cam discussed by Jon Henrik Ziegler Remme in this volume is a potential site of noticing. Remme describes a ‘digital intimacy’ between human and lobster through playfulness facilitated by the online live camera. Although the relations are ambiguous – after all, the point of a commercial lobster trap is to trap a lobster to eat it – the Marine Institute’s trap-cam creates a digital space in which lobsters can be known as individuals, as beings with preferences.

The attentiveness to individuals and their beings (past or present) is also stressed by Hannah Hunter, Sandra Jasper, and Jonathan Prior in this volume. Sound recordings make the calls of species, or even single individuals, audible to humans far from the locations and times of those animals’ lives. Sound archives emerge ‘as a space for ecological memorialisation’ as species decline and ecosystems are permanently disrupted. Such is the case with the lonely Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō calling for a mate who never comes, and the spread of that song through digital media highlighted the loss of the ‘o‘o. Sound is ‘an affective, relational, ephemeral force that vibrates through our entire bodies, literally moving us’. One lesson of the Hunter et al. chapter is that attentiveness can involve many senses – organisms are made visible through more than just the visual. Listening to the audio is part of noticing what it is to be another.

The Our Chicken Life platform with its multicamera video feed of a chicken flock also places attention on the chicken’s way of being. Catherine Oliver shows how Our Chicken Life exposes innate chicken behaviours to subscribers, who gleefully observe how a chick hatches and is guided by the mother hen, and allows them to participate in chicken lives by feeding them mealworms as distance caretakers. However, this care only goes so far since both the physical and digital flocks are entangled in capitalist systems of production. As Oliver notes, ‘it is precisely because the chicken has had such an intimate, exploitative relationship with humans that this case provides such stark insights into how virtual encounters might be new frontiers for value extraction’. Even being attentive has its limits.

Humans being attentive and paying attention also comes with risk to the organism. As Hunter, Jasper, and Prior note, digital sound recordings can make animals visible by attracting them to the location of the replayed sound, which may be useful for conservationists trying to count individuals but can also be mobilsed by hunters. Oscar Hartman Davies and Jamie Lorimer comment in their chapter that albatrosses (only some of which are equipped with geolocators) might be intentionally shot by fishermen in order to combat ocean surveillance. Even in the case of wiring forests up to smart grids discussed in the chapter by Jennifer Gabrys, the focus on one thing (in this case the trees) might ‘render obsolete and inassimilable any bodies, practices, or organisms that would not contribute to the productive augmentation of smart green economies and ecologies’. Visibility is not equally just.

Making humans and their technologies visible

The Okeanos Explorer feed is not only about encounters with pristine natures. We remember a dive in 2017 that was set up to investigate a potential shipwreck archaeological site which had been identified through a survey. When the ROV got there, however, it turned out to be a debris field of washing machines from a shipping container that had been lost at sea.¹⁰ Trash is a relatively common sight on dives. One study of the video feed from ROV expeditions of Okeanos Explorer and another ship found that debris was spotted on 17.5% of the dives in the Pacific; nearly half the debris was metal, whereas fishing gear and plastic each made up 20% of the total.¹¹ These mundane encounters with garbage in the deep sea reveal the extent to which human activity expands into the oceans. Michael Brennan and colleagues argue that telepresence-enabled exploration is providing opportunities for archaeology beyond targeting a specific wreck through an ‘archeology of discard’ that stresses the accidental nature of most marine debris disposal.¹² Looking at debris also allows coupling of archaeological and biological investigations, seeing the organisms growing on or inhabiting the human artefacts as in relation with those artefacts.¹³

As we have seen watching the Okeanos feed, humans and their things are everywhere. The Anthropocene, while not yet an official stratigraphic designation, is certainly our living condition. While environmental humanities scholars have often criticised the Anthropocene label for its homogenisation of all humans as the culprit for radical environmental change rather than pinpointing capitalist or production structures (such as in the names Capitalocene or Plantationocene), they have also acknowledged the need to recognise that the speed and scale of change is creating ‘severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before’.¹⁴ Human influence on the planet’s biota is deep and wide.

Emerging digital ecologies can make visible human effects on animal behaviours and on the planet writ large. Davies and Lorimer in this volume show how digital ocean governance is facilitated on the back of albatrosses. Trackers attached to albatrosses – ‘on-bird surveillance’ as they label it – help to identify illegal fishing activities because albatross movement is associated with ships. Making visible the geography of the birds makes visible the geography of humans and their effects on bird behaviour. The birds do not live their lives apart from humans; they are entangled in larger human production structures.

Humans and their technologies can also be made visible in distant seeing. Wildlife documentaries have often been critiqued for the disembodiment of the camera and camera operators who have captured the film; they are not supposed to appear except in special ‘behind-the-scenes’ additional tracks.¹⁵ This is not the case with Okeanos Explorer. There are typically three live camera feeds – one from the main ROV, one from the companion ROV, and one from the control centre – which means that a view of technology is always available. Even when watching the camera on the main ROV, the broadcast includes audio from the technicians discussing ship movements, sampling techniques, time left in the dive, and so on, and the ROV arms are often visible in the wide bottom shots as well as when samples are being collected. The technological components of the digital ecology are made visible with Okeanos Explorer.

Technology is more than a tool or network in which other ecologies live; it is an active member of ecosystems, as Andrew Dwyer makes clear in his chapter on computation and malicious software. Computational choices – whether they interpret a piece of code or an image as one thing or another – leads to other choices (by non-organics and organics) in the system. Malware detection software often makes itself and its identified targets visible to the human user, even if the processes it uses to come to that conclusion are opaque. Hashtagging as social practice similarly creates, rather than just reports on, events. The digital ecosystem of #AmazonFires discussed by Jonathan W.Y. Gray, Liliana Bounegru, and Gabriele Colombo contains fires, organisms, and humans, just as the Amazon in Brazil does. More than flames, the event of #AmazonFires is constructed through posting, sharing, and liking content. The Estonian hiied sacred groves of Mari Arold’s chapter are constructed as much by GIS maps and Facebook posts as they are by the trees themselves. Just as ecocritics Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann have argued that matter configures both meanings and substances through interactions, so is matter a site of narrativity; technologies have both narrative and material repercussions on digital ecologies.¹⁶

Humans inhabiting these digital spaces also become visible in distinct ways. As Jess McLean and Lara Newman show in their chapter on the digital environmental activism of School Strike 4 Climate Australia, social media posts can amplify local place-based action and give a voice to those not heard through other means. Distributed digital protest can highlight on-the-ground environmental justice activism. Like the work of gardeners who grow plants and collect seeds for the London Freedom Seed Bank discussed by Sophia Doyle and Katharine Dow, human knowledge and action become inscribed in digital databanks.

Seeing and not seeing

The digital video from Okeanos Explorer is more than an ephemeral experience. It has been used to identify and describe numerous species new to science. Christopher Mah, a starfish specialist with the Smithsonian Institution and whose voice is often heard on the Okeanos Explorer broadcast as a telepresent scientist, has used ROV video in addition to physical samples to describe twelve newly discovered sea stars.¹⁷ The video provided occurrence and behavorial observation data, as well as still images of the species in their natural habitat.

Yet caution is warranted about thinking that digital ecologies are always transparent and revealing. Although digital ecologies make visible many organisms, humans, and technologies, we should also not overestimate their effects. As Alaimo notes, ‘Extinction and “discovery” may happen simultaneously in the Anthropocene seas, paradoxical places that are greatly altered but little known, harboring both compressed and expansive temporalities’.¹⁸ The absence of knowledge about the deep sea is real, leading environmental humanities scholar Michelle Bastian to propose situating ethnographies of unknown extinctions (like the commensals of whale falls which no longer happen because of decreased whale populations) on ‘suspended ground’ that embraces the uncertainty.¹⁹ At the same time, it’s not coincidence that Bastian ends her article with a reflection about a live video feed of a whale fall from the Exploration Vessel Nautilus, a ship similar to the Okeanos Explorer run by the independent Ocean Exploration Trust. It is through the digital that deep sea whale falls – and their potential absence – have become seen by scientists and lay watchers alike.

The deep sea is a world to itself, a vast ecology that has been inaccessible to humanity for most of human history. Rendered inhospitable for humans by lack of oxygen, low temperatures, deep darkness, and crushing pressure, it is nevertheless full of life. Over time, various technologies have allowed for new ways of sensing this life. With Okeanos Explorer and similar ROV-based telepresence technologies, we as watchers can connect with these remote underwater ecologies. But our presence also changes everything. The deep sea is no longer unseen, and more and more of it is mapped for potential exploitation. In particular, deep-sea mining threatens these recently discovered vistas and ecologies. Digital ecologies in the previously unseen oceans become exploitable in new ways. The big test for digital ecologies like these is whether our acts of noticing and our digital presence will shape future governance to facilitate relations or to break them.