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Animals that Calculate. Zoo Technologies from the Ocean

This article questions the widely accepted assumption of a cybernetic breakdown of ontological boundaries in the 20th century by presenting two historically distinct constellations of human and nonhuman actors. Using the examples of John C. Lillys experiments in interspecies communication with dolphins during the 1960s and the rise of swarm intelligence research in the computer sciences around 1990, it argues that an adherent and profound «deprivation of the naturalness of animals» initiated novel epistemic processes: «Animals» thus neither appear as «other« nor «similar» beings but as abstract operational zootechnologies that are integrated into specific media-technological settings. This transformation from nonhuman actors to «computational animals» is intertwined with a conceptual change within the computer sciences that no longer conceptualize «intelligence» as an application of representational «expert knowledge» but as »relational interaction».