A few years back, I noticed a book titled, Tubes, that immediately stood out by its graphic depiction of a physical reality of what the author was claiming to be the internet. The internet, in basest terms, is made up of pulses of light (running through some fiber optic cables). It exists. "It has a physical reality, an essential infrastructure, a "hard bottom", as Henry David Thoreau said of Walden Pond" (Blum, Andrew. Tubes).


By "making visible the invisible", academics like Andrew Blum, along with a growing number of artists and designers, are looking to further identify the natural phenomena around us. While demystifying natural systems can help us redesign more meaningful connections, Shannon Mattern argues that there is a fine line in this act of observation and categorization. While in an earlier essay she makes a promising argument for those in the practice of fieldwork, a follow up essay that was just recently published questions the fieldworker with its tendencies to be looking through "colonialist binoculars".  While social practices of documenting and rebranding infrastructures can arguably lead to motivation for activism and a possible restructuring of these systems, there is also a tendency for many to alienate the subject or "specimen" from us. The age old methods of taxonomy are known for sterilizing and reducing nature to objects that seem to bare no connection to its larger ecosystem. As the Romantic naturalist and painter said in reply to Goethe's request for a commissioned catalog of clouds, "‘to force the free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification’ would damage their expressive potential and even ‘undermine the whole foundation of landscape painting.’”" The importance to reflect on our ideologies behind our methods is what Shannon Mattern stresses in her conclusion to the essay titled, "Cloud and Field".