Keynote Lecture I “Tree Mediation, or Arboreal Entanglement”
Prof. Richard Grusin
Keynote Lecture “Tree Mediation, or Arboreal Entanglement”
Arboreal imaginings have multiplied over the past three decades, not only in the natural sciences but in the popular imaginings of art, literature, and film. In the late 1990s, the heyday of internet enthusiasm in the west, the concept of a "wood-wide web" was coined by botanists and other natural scientists, based upon research showing that trees communicated with mycorrhizal fungi through infrastructural networks whose morphological formation was analogized to the World-Wide Web. In this lecture I will unpack what is at stake in this analogy, interrogating this increasingly popular comparison in order to explore how technical, human, and arboreal networks are linked by their participation in processes of radical tree mediation. I begin by taking up the question of plant mediation to understand what trees and plants have in common. I then lay out some of the operations of arboreal entanglement to begin to understand the specificity of trees among the plant world at large. I will conclude the talk by considering the effectiveness of metaphors like the wood wide web in raising ecopolitical awareness about forests, trees, and climate change generally.
 |
Richard Grusin (GCSC/RCSC Distinguished Research Fellow)
Richard Grusin is Distinguished Professor Emerit of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he served as Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies from 2010-2015 and 2017-2021. He has published four books in English and one in Italian: Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991); Remediation: Understanding New Media, with Jay David Bolter (MIT, 1999), Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2003); Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010), and Radical Mediation: Cinema, Estetica, e Tecnologie Digitali (Pellegrini, 2017). He has also edited six volumes with University of Minnesota Press: The Nonhuman Turn (2015); Anthropocene Feminism (2017); After Extinction (2018); Ends of Cinema (2020); Insecurity (2022); and The Long 2020 (2023). His current research interests focus on the arboreal humanities. He is currently a GCSC/RCSC Distinguished Research Fellow. |