Rewilding the Digital Archive: An Artistic Exploration of the Bug as a Decolonial Agent

In “Moths Dreaming of Electric Waters”, artist duo Fadi Houmani and Ster Borgam created a digital ecosystem inhabited by cyber-bugs to challenge the anthropocentric worldviews and digital technologies implicated in colonial and extractivist systems. I engaged in in-depth conversations with Houmani and Borgman and complemented these dialogues with eco-feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous epistemologies. Drawing out a theoretical frame from the artwork, I invite the bug into the digital archive as a means of rewilding. The bug embodies complementary roles: a glitch, a hybrid, and a perspective. Theorizing these roles, I draw principles that can guide the (re)construction of a decolonial digital archive: decentralization, reciprocity, fluidity, and connectivity. Rewilding the digital archive is an invitation to envision new ways of relating with nature, technology, and each other. To build a world worth preserving.