As the AI era takes hold and biosensing technologies advance, the natural world is increasingly being approached as another form of data – that can be decoded, monitored and optimised whether for profit or conservation. From translating whale communication to smart forests, for better and worse, the “internet of things” is taking on a new dimension. While recognising the positive potential of this rapidly accelerating field and welcoming ethical guidelines being proposed to steer advances, more fundamental questions remain, such as: Who do these advances really serve? And do they shortcut the deeper work of reconnection and repair with the more-than-human?

When anthropocentric (and colonial) logics underpin the imaginaries the potential for more vibrant and mutually beneficial relations between machines and the web of life is foreclosed. These logics risk narrowing the potential of what AI can be, and fail to recognise the full richness and complexity of nature’s intelligence. Meanwhile, the local and ancestral knowledge and meanings that form the glue in an intricate set of relations across lifeworlds are ignored. When the Web of Life is reduced to abstract data, exploitation and alienation follow.

Webs of Life is a research initiative that aims to catalyse and unearth a broader and more mutually beneficial set of theoretical and technological experiments with which to re-orientate AI’s inter-relations with nature. By bringing web-based technologies into creative dialogue with nature, we want to seed alternative visions for what the Internet of Things can be when guided by the intelligences of the Web of Life.