The Comet’s Eye: A Metaphorical Exploration of Technological and Ecological Networks

This essay utilises three comets – Halley’s Comet (1066), the Great Comet of 1811, and Hale-Bopp (1995–97) – to compare Britain’s economic and ecological histories with the internet, linking enclosure, industrialisation, corporatisation, and extractivism on and offline. It introduces the interranet as a conceptual ecology and nature-culture hybrid of infrastructure and land, and e-cology as the interdependent forces that make the internet a living, strained system. The artwork After Halley explores craft as both method and material – an embodied form of ecological knowledge. This research questions how, with new ways of relating, the internet might recover from extractive processes.