Entangled Networks: Metaphor as Method, Matter, and Media

Oldfield, Alis (2025) Entangled Networks: Metaphor as Method, Matter, and Media. Arts, 14 (6). p. 152. ISSN 2076-0752

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Abstract

This article examines how metaphors operate in digital media not as descriptive analogies but as structuring forces that shape how technologies are designed, understood, and inhabited. Building on Marianne van den Boomen’s theory of digital material metaphors, it argues that metaphors such as the “desktop,” “cloud,” and “frontier” encode social and ideological assumptions into the infrastructures of computation. These metaphors render digital systems legible while concealing not just the procedural computation that van den Boomen terms depresentation, but the material, ecological, and labour conditions that sustain them. Using my practice-based work c(o)racle, 2025, as a case study, the internet is explored as a metaphorical and material terrain that connects networks of data, water, and craft, interrogating the dominant metaphor of cyberspace as immaterial and untethered, in dialogue with Tim Ingold, Lakoff and Johnson, Henri Lefebvre, and Yuk Hui. Drawing on S. J. Tambiah, Bruno Latour, and Elizabeth Wayland Barber, the essay situates metaphor within broader histories of making and mediation. By activating metaphor as both method and medium, the study proposes a critical reorientation toward digital space as an entangled, situated, and contested environment.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number:	10.3390/arts14060152
Dates:	Date Event 1 November 2025 Accepted 26 November 2025 Published Online
Uncontrolled Keywords:	material metaphor, digital media, network, cyberspace, artistic practice
Subjects:	CAH25 - design, and creative and performing arts > CAH25-01 - creative arts and design > CAH25-01-02 - art
Divisions:	Arts > Art and Design
Depositing User:	Gemma Tonks
Date Deposited:	26 Feb 2026 16:14
Last Modified:	26 Feb 2026 16:14
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16892

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