 We are so honored to have our speaker, Shannon Madden, with us here today. Shannon is the pen presidential compact professor of media studies and the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. We recently lost her to Pennsylvania, but I believe she's still spending a lot of time in New York. According to her bio on the University of Pennsylvania website, her dad owned a hardware store and makes beautiful furniture and her mom was a special education teacher. And I really appreciate her putting this kind of lineage into, you know, how she presents herself as a scholar. Before Ben, between 2004 and 2022, she worked in the School of Media Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the New School and collaborated regularly with the Parsons School of Design. When I started my career as a teacher and scholar right here at GISA, Shannon is who I wanted to be when I grew up. Over the last decade, since I've been following her work, her work has brought together an astonishing array of subjects from libraries to sonic scapes to hardware stores. As she took on ambitious projects aimed at redesigning the academy, thinking with trees and of writing is grafting. Her practice has been described as recasting the field of design anthropology in media theory, but Shannon wears many hats. She is an activist, a design scholar, a writer, a geographer, a cartographer, an archivist. And as I was discussing with my students in the morning, a data philosopher, a tree hugger in the best sense of the word, and an advocate for open public access to knowledge. In one of her recent interviews, the interviewer described her as a gap-bridging intellectual, which I read as academic code for refusing to abide by disciplinary boundaries. But really, Shannon is one of the most important thinkers of our times. A thinker, and here I'm going to channel my inner Donna Haraway, a thinker whose thoughts we think thoughts with. And with that, I will stop fangirling and invite Shannon to join us. Please welcome Shannon Whitby. Wow, that was so nice. Thank you so much. If ever I'm not pointing appropriately towards the microphone and you can't hear me well, just raise your hand and I'll try to project better. I used to not be a procrastinator. I was the type of person who turned in work like a week or two early to the point that sometimes it was so early people would forget that I even handed it in. I have somehow, over the past several years, become the person who finishes 10 minutes before. So this is a brand new project of a work in progress. So it's kind of like doubly provisional, but hopefully that'll give you a chance to find knots or whatever. I'm trying to think of the right metaphor here is holes in the log, breaks in the trees to kind of insert your own voice. And I would love to get your input as I shape this in its next iterations. So as the first slide indicates, I'm going to be talking with you about arboreal intelligence. So when Andres wrote me to invite me to be a part of this series, he asked me if I could talk about trees as data and the digitization of nature. But I'll start with three short recent news stories that demonstrate the various ways that trees constitute data. First, the Canadian forest fires were diligently datified, mapped and registered quantitatively as air quality indices. And I'm assuming all of you were here for this just a couple of weeks ago. I probably checked a lot of these apps and maps as you went about your day. But they also brought a tragically common West Coast empirical experience to the East. They introduced us to embodied visible visceral data. That is not just on the screen, but we can actually see and feel and breathe in indices of what was happening a thousand miles away. An experiential index of a disturbance, as I said, hundreds or even thousands of miles away because it reached all the way down into Virginia in that region. Trees turned into ash, blown south as a portent of climate change. Second, consider Trump's attachment to his papers, clippings, letters and other documents that reminded him of his proximity to power. These stacked slices of tree, a performative trope that recurred throughout his presidency. He loved to pose in front of big stacks of paper to kind of demonstrate both his productivity and his administrative prowess and just the important stuff that he got to touch every day. But here, in the most recent case, they were marked with consequential content most of it classified and probably touched by important hands. And thus restored vertically in cardboard boxes themselves tree products strewn across the Mar-a-Lago ballroom, bathroom, office, bedroom and storage room. Making them an architectural phenomenon. So I'm going to try to insert little things just like this is how this is architecture, this is how it matters to architecture. So these piles of paper constituted bureaucratic monuments, very modest ones obviously, an accumulation of ego and an emblem of willful disobedience. Third, trees are a likely backdrop that is at COP28, the UN climate talks that will be held this year in oil-rich United Arab Emirates. And where oil and gas companies will be well represented at the deliberations. Sultan al-Jabbar, head of the national oil company, has championed the need for, quote, abatement. A word that, as the New York Times notes, has resounded with frequency, increasingly frequently, among some climate negotiators. And which seems to imply that, quote, climate goals and continued fossil fuel production are compatible as long as technology to capture their emissions is widely deployed, end quote. Emirati diplomat Majid al-Sawadi expects the discussion to focus on, quote, what we're building up, what we're scaling up, what we're speeding up, not overtaking away from people. In other words, you don't need to sacrifice, you can have more and more and more, we're just going to use technology to take away all the bad stuff. Given the historical popularity of tree planting initiatives in the UAE, we can bet that one of those abatement technologies will be trees. A convenient, charismatic green screen, an organic absorbent, and alibi for continued carbon emissions. The tree as a carbon observing technology scales up to a global, measurable mass in the form of now ubiquitous tree planting campaigns. Precision forestry, the consultants of McKinsey tell us, resembles agriculture in its focus on monocultures, selectively bred tree species, and a relatively high degree of automation. Satellite images and lidar scanners on soil sensors will enable loggers to adapt planting and harvesting to meet customer demand, to model terrains and water flow, to assess standing wood inventory, to more efficiently fail and cut specific items within that inventory, to optimize trees, dissection into logs, to detect outbreaks of pests and disease, and to offer early warning of forest fires. Drones in the forest and on the farm can plant seeds and saplings, strategically spray for weeds and pests, and dispense fertilizer precisely where and when it's needed. One such company that does this is a company called Dendra, which performs ecosystem analysis and reporting, and then deploys drones for strategic planting, often in remote areas where it's dangerous for people to go. Data-driven arboreal solutionism, arboreal meanings relating to trees, solutionism meaning a kind of a methodology and approaches are going to solve a solution with a technological apparatus or methodology. It's also apparent in projects like Living Carbon, a biotech company founded by folks formally associated with open AI and DuPont, to genetically engineer trees that offer lots of measurable qualities that will be bigger, faster and stronger, which appeal to reformers seeking quantifiable outcomes. Trees also become quantitative variables in carbon markets, and as mapable anchors imploding out more sustainable supply chains. Tree data are also emblematic of other forms of virtue, in this case, social equity, mapping urban tree canopy as a proxy for environmental justice. American Forest has made this correlation explicit in the form of a tree equity score, and some of this might be familiar to you from the tree thinking piece. I promise you not all this talk is going to rehash the article, and just kind of covering some of it, recovering some of the terrain. And this tree equity score obviously uses cartography to indicate where trees can be strategically deployed to address myriad social injustices. We can deploy all the tools of big tech, satellites, sensors, lidar, artificial intelligence, to map the world's forests, count its trees, identify their leaves. Lindsay Wickstrom, in her recently published Designing the Forest, advocates for using computational tools to promote more sustainable forestry and environmentally friendly mass timber construction. But the digitization of forests isn't only a corporate or extractive enterprise. Consider local activists in Sumatra who are installing tree top monitoring units, used cell phones powered by solar panels specially designed to work in densely-foliated terrains, to listen for and distinguish between the sounds of chainsaws, logging trucks, and other sonic clues at the legal logging. Media scholar Jennifer Gabrice and her CitizenSense team at Cambridge, that's Cambridge, England, not the multiple universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, deploy various computational tools to gather and render spatial data that can help us to better understand and steward our forests. I mean, there's this kind of tiny type here. This is the website for CitizenSense. They're specifically their smart forest projects, where you can see the various media forms the team uses from remote sensors to camera tracks to even the blockchain, as well as the various applications from forest observation to optimization to encouraging community participation and affecting regulatory change. Gabrice also warns that such practices could, quote, present the problem of environmental change through a particular set of metrics that in turn legitimate specific technological interventions to meet targets for averting environmental catastrophe. In other words, this chain of kind of self-reifying data with a technological solution. In other words, they could promote technosolutionist responses to ecological, cultural, and political economic problems, which we also see manifested in proposals to solve the climate crisis, not by curbing extraction and consumption, but by performing carbon capture and fossil fuel recovery, and by planting trees. There's a long history, one chapter of which is the rise of scientific forestry in the 18th century, wherein trees have been instrumented as solutions to larger problems. The artistic duo cooking sections, cooking sections, that is, made this arboreal logic palpable. Experiential, inhabitable in a 2019 exhibit here right at Columbia, which critiqued the notion that trees are meant to offset. In financially calculable terms, the deleterious effects of ecological degradation. Trees excuse us from having to address root causes. Dotably, the trees in this exhibition have no roots. And this brings me to the intervention that I hope to make. My own roots in the field of media and information studies compel me to replant this whole discussion inside a more capacious conception of data and media. Trees, and plants more generally, have been inveterate partners in the history of mediation, in multiple senses of the term. They've interceded between us and our environments. They're providing shelter and clothing, going back to kind of the very foundational history of architecture. They've also facilitated human communication and engaged in their own forms of communication. Thinking about how arboreal forms populate the family tree of media history, and how they can lead us toward branching future pathways, can show that trees have been at the root of much of human cultural, social, economic, and political activity, and that our carbon-based lives are deeply entangled, entangled, that is, with theirs. This is a new project for me, or rather a newly grafted one that blends and builds upon a couple decades of prior endeavors and convictions. Because I'm still exploring and not yet able to see the forest for the trees and some of this material, I decided that it would be counter-protective for me to force this sapling of a project, where I'm still reading dozens of books and thousands of articles and have hundreds of bookmarks and catalog the whole bunch of art projects that are relevant in design projects. Instead of forcing it into an argumentative form solely for the purpose of sharing it with you, which would probably mess me up in the larger term of things, I've been assured something much more provisional. I will say I also hoped to use this semester a transition between my old institution, the new school right down the street where I was for 20 years, to my new institution, the University of Pennsylvania. I'd hoped to use this time to write a book proposal on arboreal media, but all those transitions unfortunately consumed that time I would have liked to have been working on this project. I really do need to spend a few more weeks following the branches, finding the rhetorical trunks, and planting my own roots in order to determine the structure of the project. So what follows isn't really a polished text, although I'm going to read some parts with a single argument. Instead, it's a graft, a partially scripted, partly extemporized presentation. I hope you'll think of it as a forest of references through which I'm trying to map my way, and I hope you could help me with that. So returning for a moment to the family tree, I want to tell you a bit more about my own roots to situate this project autobiographically. Last week my dad drove from central Pennsylvania where I grew up to visit us in Philadelphia. The past two years have been pretty difficult for our family, as I'm sure for everyone because of the pandemic and all the destruction it has wrought, and especially for him. They've included lots of loss and grief and alienation, including from many of the things he's loved. Not long ago, dad spent most evenings and winter weekends in his wood shop, making furniture for family and friends, or repairing pieces for patrons at the hardware store that he and his brothers inherited from my grandfather. Here are a couple of his high boys, all hand-carved. Here's my mom's desk. Here's her spice cabinet. He made one for me to house the jewelry that I never wear. Here's my desk. And here are the shelves that we built together when I lived in Philadelphia 20 years ago in a loft, and he did something big enough to move around and actually serve as a space divider. Sadly, I had to give them away a few years ago. When we moved from Peter Cooper Village, down on 23rd Street, to Hudson, two hours north of the city. So after two decades of lugging these huge seven-foot things around between Philadelphia and multiple New York City apartments, only choosing apartments that I could fit them in the door and up the steps, it was a house in Hudson that kind of did me and I couldn't get them in the door. So I had to give them away to a friend, which was a very sad departure. The wood shop, which dad built himself, sits at the end of the driveway and circled by hickories and pear trees, and across from it a shed that holds roughly 40,000 board feet of cherry, walnut, tiger and bird's eye maple, mahogany and purple heart, as well as several feral cats. Care for his parents, and more recently my mom, has kept dad away from his chisels and lays for the past few years. While he speaks often of missing the sounds and smells of woodworking, he finds it hard to muster the motivation to open the door and turn on the shop light. He also, in our tiny small town, actually the village probably has a couple hundred people. The closest town has about 5,000 people, so it's pretty rural. There aren't too many skilled craftspeople that he can form kind of a self-motivational group with in this area. So we designed his trip to Philadelphia to reacquaint him with trees in both planted and plank form. So on his first afternoon we visited the Philadelphia Woodworking Company, who created the built-in bookshelves in our new house in Philadelphia. My dad and Matt geeked out over a tank-like German planer from the 1970s. They talked about dust collection systems and lumber sourcing and finishing techniques, sharing arcane knowledge and using terms that, much to my delight, excluded me from the conversation. I didn't really care that I was involved, I was just glad that he was excited about what he was talking about. Later that afternoon we stopped at the Museum for Art and Wood, whose collection focuses on turned wood, but whose current exhibition features Mashrabiyah, Islamic screens, ornamental apparatus that aided in climate control. If you know Daniel Barber's work, who writes about the prehistories of climate control, he talks about some of these architectural interventions that helped to control climates before we had HVAC systems, or their kind of proto-HVAC systems. The next day we visited the Warden Eschric Museum, and if you haven't been there, it's not far, not a far drive from New York, highly recommended, which includes the home and studio of this key figure in the American studio craft movement. Eschric started off as an impressionist painter, then began carving his own frames, then took up woodblock printing, and finally moved to sculpture, furniture and architecture. Thus, across his career, Eschric engaged with the tree in various forms, as a scaffold for a canvas, as representational subject matter actually kind of carving or painting trees, as a print substrate painting on materials made of trees, as sculptural medium, and as building material. Perhaps not surprisingly, his home in Malvern, roughly a half hour outside of the city, feels like a treehouse. The surrounding wooded landscape provided many of the necessary resources for the buildings and the objects they housed. Our next stop, Longwood Gardens, an estate founded by Pierre Dupont, a key figure in the early 20th century chemical and automotive industries. The now public facility features forest, wetlands, agricultural fields, a conservatory and formal gardens. Here, trees function as specimens, as exemplars, as ornamentation, as representational subjects, as test subjects, as investments. Quite prescient for a family whose business ventures would contribute so profoundly to environmental degradation. And the following day, we visited the George Nakashima house, studio and workshop, where visitors can observe the process from procurement through production, by which the esteemed woodworker and his daughter Mira and their team realized the quote, one ideal use of each plank in their collection, yielding iconic live edge chairs and tables. It became clear that Nakashima's reputation steeled the supply chain for the organization. His reputation became so big that any time anyone felled in old growth, oak, walnuts or maple or redwood, they'd send the enormous specimen to the workshop, where it would be custom milled into huge planks and stored in mule form, which is kind of like keeping all of the, it's almost like keeping it in a sliced bread, where you keep all the pieces that actually came together in a log, you store them in the order. If any of you know anything about archival practice, there's a concept called respect du faune, which means keeping things in their original order, that's kind of what this is too. These five sites exemplify different yet often entangled arboreal logics and aesthetics, engineered order and organism, standardization and customization, machinic processing and manual craftsmanship, individual genius and collaborative cultivations. They embody different forms of dendrological loyalty and sylvan sympathy. I really like alliteration, as you can probably tell, and I'm not aware of it until I actually say things aloud. They cultivate and necessitate different modes of arboreal intelligence. For the past 20 years, my research has resided at the intersection of digital infrastructures and material spaces. I've written about the design of library buildings, the creation of counter-institutional collections, ethical practices in digital archives, urban communication infrastructures, logistical systems, cartographic practices. I've always sought to highlight the productive integration of old and new media, of data and various forms, of multiple intelligences. Yet after over a decade of writing about smart things, smart objects, smart cities, smart systems, smart whatever, I've grown a little weary, I'm actually not a little a lot weary of the term. This current fetishistic and hubristic discussion of artificial intelligence that we hear, GDP changing the world, totally transforming education, killing the college essay, ruining screenwriting, everything, you name it. And also the hubris that comes along with those claims too. And the supposed demise of the arts and humanities, because as a response to the early consequence of the prioritization of STEM, science, technology, education and management and math, have left me rather dejected. I have to say, what boring myopic conceptions of what constitutes data and intelligence, reifying HQ, excuse me IQ, all of these discussions if any of you are on social media who are demanding that the people debate one another, they always like pull out the IQ challenging somebody as if we're kind of actually buying into that as a measure of someone's intelligence. Weaponizing statistics, fighting over standardized test scores and forcing false binaries, mandating reductive classifications, these are all forms of kind of quantitative, positivist thinking that I don't really find super interesting really. So I've sought to engage with a different kind of intelligence, one of a more organic ecological sort. If, and I'm assuming most of you here have read my piece on tree thinking, which was noted in the description for this event and required for those of you in the class as I understand it, you've likely seen that I talk about the tree as a formal and conceptual means of organizing knowledge, as we see manifested in things like the dichotomous key classification or decision tree algorithms and the family tree. I'll admit that my own family tree and its recent morphological transformation has been a primary source of motivation for this project. I want to capture the modes of intelligence, the variegated forms of data inherent in the woodshop and the forest and the orchard and the arboretum and the hardware store and materials, ideas and values they help us cultivate. I also want to author, excuse me, honor the capacious and compassionate forms of intelligence manifested in my mom's work as a special education teacher for over four years, as well as the cognitive evolution we experience collectively as her mind and memory are transformed by Alzheimer's. So yes, this project on arboreal media, I think I'm going to skip one too far. Sorry, there it is. So yes, this project on arboreal media along with a parallel project where I'm going to be focusing on intellectual furnishings. The furniture we create, modify and restore to preserve and organize our media and support our intellectual labor. They constitute what some people call a form of me search, a type of investigation that has occasionally been disparaged by scholars and practitioners who equate intelligence and rigor with critical distance and impartiality. One of the selling points of data based work is its presumed objectivity and exactitude. Computers aren't supposedly aren't tainted by subjectivity and emotion, by situational variables and historical legacies. But the critical discussions around AI demonstrate just how partial each development and application is not impartially they're often deployed, reinforcing or exacerbating social iniquities. Black feminist and indigenous scholars in particular have long acknowledged the impossibility and impoverishment of failing to at least reflect on one's investment in and influence over the work they do, whether research or design or policymaking. Plus the work on arboreal intelligence builds on an assortment of projects that has accidentally accumulated over the past decade or so. That's my own projects that is. I've written about G.O.R. archives, including especially the Lamont Doherty collection, which is right across the river. It's part of Columbia University in the Palisades. If any of you have a chance to go there, highly worth a visit. So I looked at the G.O.R. archives and the use of sediment and ice cores, corals and tree rings as data sources about climate change. I've written about the organizational logics and aesthetics of building materials and hardware stores. I've written both in a 2018 exhibition broad sheet and in my 2021 book about grafting as a poetic practice and an intellectual method. I've written about the parallels between the green screen, a technique of chromatic compositing, and greenwashing. I also, I think next month actually this is coming out, a piece about arboreal law, tree law, and how ontological questions about what actually constitutes a tree, inform how a tree itself is conceived as property and how trees often determine the boundaries of landed property. And as I mentioned earlier, I've written about tree thinking. My earlier explorations of grafting prompted me to investigate trees as epistemological objects like things to think with, things that shape our thinking. Trees as sites where people gather to think and make important decisions. Trees as embodiments of data and countable things that shape climate science and policy. Trees as conceptual and methodological models for human and automated classification and decision making. And trees constituting networked organic systems of communication. Now I want to organize this work into an arboreal or rhizomatic form that exemplifies the deeply rooted, widely branching realm of arboreal media. So in our remaining time we'll follow just a few of those branches. The first is trees as media substrates, substances or scaffolds. Some of this again might appear familiar but a lot of it will be new, I hope. So the Sumerians fashioned reeds into the styli they used to make wedge shaped marks on clay tablets. Egyptians pressed strips of papyrus into the sheets on which they wrote texts in red and black inks, themselves composed of charcoal and acacia gum mixed with lead or copper. And later around the second century BCE the Chinese began mashing tree bark, hemp, and rags together to make paper. And about a millennium later they began using trees in the form of wood blocks to create prints. Up until the late modern period plants, leaves, and stems became media by succumbing to mechanical forces and organic processes, stripping, mashing, scraping, washing, fermenting, pressing. Eventually chemicals like lime and chlorine aided in the paper making process to make possible the creation of new techno botanical media. In the late 19th century George Eastman created celluloid film by combining camphor derived from the camphor laurel plant and nitrocellulose itself a compound formed by exposing cellulose, the building blocks of plants cell walls to nitric acid. All this is to say so much of our history of media is actually drawing on botanical stuff, whether it's paper or even something seemingly plastic like film. Vast forests enabled the rise of the mass press around the same time. As Michael Stam writes in his book Dead Tree Media, we should expand our understanding of what constitutes the newspaper industry, which sadly you probably was dying in its material form unfortunately, to include not only publishers and journalists but also lumberjacks, paper mill workers, chemists, and policy makers who incentivize American publishers to favor Canadian newsprint. Early 20th century editions of the editor and publisher regularly discussed forestry and paper mill news. They reported that in 1911 that is, the New York Governor John Dix at the annual dinner for the New York Press Club asked, do you realize that in this country alone it requires 300 acres of timberland a day to supply the paper to distribute the news? Again not the case today but an important historical consideration. Without paper reforestation we cannot hope to maintain or to obtain this supply indefinitely. A decade and half later the trade journal's staff lamented that the two-day national conference on the utilization of forest products failed to invite a single representative from the newspaper industry. So the forestry and print publishing and myriad forms had been entangled for a very long time, but they don't often or always kind of acknowledge the other's contributions to what they do. Meanwhile actual living trees have been serving for millennia as stations for engraved or posted declarations and solicitations from I was here to we found your dog to want to learn yoga. Even when we harness the electromagnetic spectrum as a medium plants continued to serve as communication resources. The sap of the gut of perchetry supplied the latex that insulated submarine telegraph cables. Trees yielded their trunks and succumbed to a wash in plant-based creosote in order to prop up proliferating wires. At street level poles which my colleague media scholar Lisa Gittleman describes as trees undone constitute a continued to host a palimpsest of tacked on announcements and solicitations. We still see this to some degree on utility poles around the city many of which are metal but and especially if you go outside the city you'll find that most of them are still kind of creosote poles. Kind of a reincarnation of the tree. The row regarded those poles as trees not undone but ennobled. Quote, I put my ear to one of the posts and it seemed to me as if every pore of the wood was filled with music. As if every fiber was affected in being reasoned or time or seasoned or timed. Rearranging according to a new and more harmonious law how this wild tree from the forest, stripped of its bark and set up here rejoices to transmit this music. So there was a lot of romanticization of the ether in the early days of kind of early telecommunications. People didn't quite understand the science of how it worked. So there was some understanding of it's a mix of science and magic which is kind of the vibe that permeates some of the way for the ray. Eulogizes, celebrates the humble telephone pole and he rejoices it to transmit the music which he calls the music of the telegraph harp. In addition to serving as telecommunications props and musical instruments and arboreal oracles, trees also served as transmitters themselves. During World War II military innovators discovered that trees could act as nature's own wireless towers and antennae combined. While more portable and efficient technology ultimately replaced what they call the fluorophone, similar setups are still used by jungle platoons and eco artists. A few years ago there was some speculation that we could simply spray trees with neocompacitors to turn them into full body antennae. That idea doesn't really seem to have taken root. Yet telecom companies continue to disguise some of their cell towers as palms and pines to enable them to blend not so elegantly, they're not really fooling anybody into the suburban flora. As the ether fills with transmissions, however, trees have proven to be rather uncooperative ambient apparatus. After leaves sometimes obstruct fragile 5G millimeter waves, rain drops are also problematic for this. That means that super fast next generation wireless most likely won't reach a lot of rural areas, not only because of intrusive greenery, but also because such tiny markets can't justify the implementation of dense small cell hardware installations. Environmental riches are sadly a liability in some rural communities on the wrong side of the digital divide. In Clear Fork, Tennessee, for instance, those who are connected mostly to the internet vets have slow, expensive satellite service that barely works in the summer when foliage is dense or when the weather is bad. In the absence of commercial internet service providers, local and national tech advocacy groups are working to build a community network for Clear Fork. Greta Byrom, who is a graduate of urban planning here at Columbia and Everbusi, note that the valley's topography and vegetations necessitate a network architecture quality. It's quite different from those we'd find in a city. So here is some of the topography, but also the degree of foliation that actually requires totally different logics of network building. Quote, high frequency, high bandwidth signals, like on the 5 GHz band and up, bounce around in the terrain, echoing off metal rooftops, disappearing into rises and hollers, and scattering among the foliage, they write. We'll explore lower frequencies in the spectrum for Clear Fork Valley, testing the idea that networking here, like organizing, community organizing, is a slow and intrepid process, and that social and interpersonal networks will be the strongest base for any wireless enterprise. Or, as Jeff Mainoff, and if you remember him, used the voice of building blog, proposed, perhaps we'll have to design new arboreal terrains, new landscape architectures that are more conducive to signal traffic. Such optimized floral workflows could cost farm and forest laborers their jobs, just as the rise of digital communication has precipitated declines in postal mail. In April of 2019, the Postal Service laid off 10,000 workers, and if anyone would think about the history of the Postal Service, they're one of the major employers of especially workers of color. Lovers had stopped professing their adoration on scented stationery, and instead sent text or sex. Retailers stopped distributing massive holiday catalogs, gifts replaced greeting cards, offices had purportedly gone paperless, and many of the mills that once filled office copy machines and filing cabinets have closed. Fewer sentiments are expressed in declarations issued on thin sheets of wood pulp, stuffed into envelopes, sealed with plant-based gum, Arabic adhesive, and cleared for delivery with a stamp. A tiny tag once made sticky by mixing alcohol and potato starch, so there are so many layers of using plants and just the act of like putting a letter in the mail. I don't know how many of us even do that anymore, but it was an important chapter of communication history. We also see a resurgence of certain forms of paper-based communication in response to the ubiquity of digital technologies. Millennials and Gen Zers, I'm not sure what all of you are out there, are sending more artisanal greeting cards supposedly. Letterpress has been reborn. Zines and chat books are the stars of popular print fairs. I don't know how many of you are maybe new to New York for this program, but the New York Art Book Fair happens every, I think, October. It used to be at PS1, now I think it's moved back to DIA. Highly recommended, it's an amazing event. And many niche publishers have focused on the book as a material object. You have Columbia, the architecture for the book. What is it? The imprint at Columbia University Press? Columbia Books on Architecture, and like a really vibrant printing tradition here. As more and more commercial activity shifts from the exchange of paper money to plastic or electromagnetic NFC or new food communication payment methods, shops are evolving in the opposite direction. Expanding bands on plastic bags increased demand for paper sacks and cloth totes. A recent report from Penn State suggests that new, stronger paper bags could be repeatedly reused than recycled for biofuel. Digital commerce is paradoxically bringing more brown paper mills back online, many under Chinese ownership, to manufacture not only paper bags but also cardboard boxes. Amazon and other online retailers have stretched our existing delivery networks and even created new logistics operations of their own, which has been the subject of several architectural studios that I have visited over the past several years including Jesse Lecavallier, if any of you know his work has done several studios on Amazon logistics for Cornell. And it's precipitated a dramatic increase in the use of container board. At the same time, these boxes have become harder to contain at a global infrastructural scale. 15 years ago, corrugated cardboard constituted 15% of America's recycling stream. Today it's nearly half and most of that waste is residential, which means it's typically mixed in with other contaminating household trash and food waste. And the question is, is this an architectural challenge? I mean, looking at things like waste streams, maybe that's an urban planning and design challenge also. Americans put plastic bags and chewing gum and bowling balls and dirty diapers, diapers and everything else you can imagine into the recycling containers. David Biederman, executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, told The Verge. About 25 to 30% of all materials collected by recycling services are too contaminated to be processed. Even just a little cheese that falls onto the bottom of the pizza box renders it kind of unrecyclable. In 2018, China restricted imports of American recyclables, including mixed paper, which led some municipalities to send their paper waste to landfills or incinerators. Yet the ban has proven to be a boon for some communities with tattered paper industries, particularly those that now make boxes from cardboard scrap and are willing to do the dirty work of sorting salvageable container board from other detritus. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have implemented new sustainable packaging standards in an attempt to cut back on all the boxes and plastic air pillows used to package and ship their goods. And even packaging, you could say, is maybe an architectural challenge, like DeLorean Scoof Video have done some projects about folding, and others have looked at kind of the box itself as an architectural object. The container ship, the container, what do you call it? The container itself and the ship also was an architectural and planning challenge. But Amazon's initiative hasn't worked exactly as planned. It's instead spawned a new repackaging industry, wherein intermediary contractors unbox and then re-box goods from third-party sellers so they meet Amazon's logistical standards. As Josh Dizezzi explains, quote, Amazon only accepts goods that are packaged a certain way. Products need to be made ready for the automated gauntlet of the fulfillment center. Again, the logics of the space that it has to be passed through to get to where it's going. Essentially, you have to backtrack, re-engineer the chain of all the things that are designed prior to it so that it fits the logic of that fulfillment center. Old barcodes and prices need to be covered up and new ones added. Glass needs to be bubble-wrapped. Loose items need to be bagged. These re-boxers, who operate in their own small-scale prep centers across the country, and especially in sales tax-free zones, are an integral, if invisible, link in Amazon's logistical network, and that network runs on cardboard. At least it does now. Biodegradable, starch-based biopolymers could compose many of our packaging materials. Cups, straws, lids, utensils, plates, bottles, trash bags, labels, glues, and tapes. Scientists and entrepreneurs imagine that nanosellulose could be used to make... I think there's supposed to be an image here. There it is. Nanosellulose could be used to make everything from biofuels to body armor and could serve a variety of medical functions, including wound dressing and bone regeneration. It's got new mediation applications, too. Wood flour, it turns out, can be transformed into transparent paper that can be applied to electronic devices and solar cells. And lignin, which is found in plant cell walls, has been found to be an exceptionally rigid and rot-resistant 3D printing material. Again, these are all things that you will probably encounter in one way or another as part of your architectural or your design practice. As our supply chains and distribution channels have globalized, so have those for the pulp and paper industries. New centers of activity have emerged around the world, including especially in Brazil, again in China, and new sustainable best practices have arrived with them. But those guidelines are not evenly applied throughout the industry. As more and more researchers and critics are monitoring the global environmental, social, political, and economic impacts of big tech and data-driven enterprises, we also need to recognize that paper, pulp, forestry, waste management, nanotech, and a host of other cellulose-infused fields are extensions of the platform economy. We need to host, excuse me, hold those industries accountable, and ourselves, too, as we contemplate the branching implications of our digital and analog habits. So that was the most developed part. The rest are a bit more extemporized. That was the one big branch. The others are tinier branches. They'll be more tenuous, too. So trees' sites of communication are mediation. And some of these examples, again, will be familiar from the article, but I have included some new stuff. So first we have trees that have served as sites for passionate and partisan deliberation. Many momentous decisions have been made under trees, under the shelter of trees. They've witnessed and even seeded the germination, hybridization, evasion, on occasion destruction of peoples and nations. As told in the first pages of the Bible, it was Eve's choice to consume forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge that condemned humanity to sin, suffering, judgment, and death. We can see in myriad religious traditions how trees are places where the important shit gets done, where big decisions are made. Centuries ago, in what is now North America, the great peacemaker of the Iroquois and his disciple, Hiawatha, brought together leaders from various Native American nations to the great treat of peace to sign treaties. And there are myriad examples of, and some may be apocryphal of important treaty making happening where people gather at trees. And that might be in part because they're kind of gathering in border zones and they're, as my arboreal law, peace shows like trees often served as kind of important indices, things you can see on the landscape, that would mark the border of a person's property, the edge of a certain kind of political boundary. Another, yet another, the council oak, another place where kind of important political things are happening. We also have the importance of trees, some interesting research on street trees, but especially if we're looking kind of like New England towns, we see the importance of the Elm as a civic symbol and as a place where important civic activities happen, parades, town discussions, town halls, things of that sort, where political candidates will give literal stump speeches on stumps. And then we also have out of a darker side of this tradition where we have witness trees where people have meted out kind of in just justice throughout histories of racial segregation and several trees, especially throughout the south but also into the north had been marked as witness trees, trees that essentially bear witness to the atrocities that happened on and under their branches. You probably also read in the piece about various elders gathering in Somalia under, in accordance with the customary legal system in Slovenia people gathering under Linden trees in Africa and Asia, the Baobab tree being a place where a lot of like civic activity happens where discussions happen, ideas are exchanged. Another interesting example is the mangrove, the mangrove school which provides in Guinea-Bissau shelter for guerrilla education. We might also want to think about what it is specifically about the mangrove as a species of tree, the specific morphology, the fact that kind of bridges land and sea and has these very entangled roots that actually make it a great space for hiding out, for performing guerrilla activities and to consider it actually mediates the types of social relations that happen within its roots. There are also continuing with the idea of trees as sites for communication. This documentary by Rita Leisner called Forest for the Trees where she follows western, Canadian or west coast tree planting campaigns. So it's just a documentary following a group of probably early 20-somethings who were spending a summer planting trees and the camaraderie and communication that happens in between them. It's a slightly romantic kind of presentation of the whole tree planting enterprise but again it shows not just the tree individual tree itself but the whole apparatus of planting trees to remediate deforestation as a way to build kind of connections between people and build friendships. There's also in Philadelphia, and I'm excited to get to work with these or to learn more about these folks, a public art project called Street Work and that's a pun with the tree actually put in parentheses in the middle of Street Work which aims to animate how we live among trees, how we perceive them and how we imagine our future co-habitation or co-habitation that is. And then also I would like to think about trees as sites for communication that go beyond the human. Here we can look at something like the nurse log which is a fallen tree in a forest that actually serves as a site for the generation of an entire ground level new ecosystem and for interspecies communication. So trees as sites for communication that go beyond just that to serve kind of human beings as well. The next branch might be trees as epistemological models and again some of the first of these will be recognizable from the article. So we have a long history of trees of knowledge being used again in multiple cultural religious traditions, trees being a way of organizing how we organize thoughts into categories, how we classify things, how we kind of break up an entire knowledge landscape into disciplines. You also have the persistence of a lot of tree forms even in computational thinking through things like decision trees, random forests, other algorithms that really still follow that kind of branching or rooted form in the way decisions are made computationally. I'd also want to think too about the history of sylvan scripts. There's a designer named Katie Holden who's written several books about the language of trees and especially looked at kind of ancient Irish tree based scripts where these are in some cases carved on trees themselves but you can see there's a real kind of arboreal or dendrological form to some of the letter forms here and how that drawing on the tree as a model, a conceptual model might shape the types of things that are communicable in these written languages or writing systems. I'd also want to look at things like indigenous maps some of which communities use things like driftwood and other wood forms to map out the terrain, the contours of a coastline for instance and what it means to think about topography in wooden form and how it maybe shapes the way that these two material forms inform one another. And the final example, this is a former TA of mine who was graduated from Parsons Transdisciplinary Design Project who's been doing a project for many years called Becoming Tree so you might have seen the example, I'm forgetting it's not the guy who did the build of your own toaster project who also did the I'm going to, being goat, he pretended, I don't want to minimize his work by saying he pretended to be a goat but he acted as a goat to understand what it's like to be another species so this is maybe drawing some inspiration from that to see about what if we draw from the modes of perception, the forms of the physical forms the rootedness, the morphologies of trees and how that might inform the way we experience our everyday lives and if we could even see, especially on hot days in the city that our bodies are drawn to or repelled by trees in different ways especially on hot days we move to where there's shade cast onto the street so there are ways that trees are already kind of informing our comportment in a built landscape. The next to last branch would be trees as sources of data so we could look at things like the whole history of field guys I wish I could have found some more historical examples from a couple hundred years ago to give you a greater historical scope here but just to see what type of data, how people have turned trees into empirical data that will help aid in their classification identification so here are just the datification of trees in different formal, chromatic, textural ways to aid in our understanding or identifying what they are and of course I wrote a piece, not of course, of course it was Ms. Place you probably don't know this but I wrote a piece a couple years ago looking at the whole history of field guides and how they are often used especially in new digital landscapes. People don't understand how the internet works or how Wi-Fi operates so a lot of artists and designers in particular have adopted the field guide form to help people understand these really messy infrastructures and complex digital systems. Another way that trees serve as data would be as you probably know tree rings which Jim Robbins describes as giant organic recording devices that contain information about past climates, civilizations, ecosystems and even galactic events. Much of that data is translated from arboreal to digital form and shared in the international tree ring data bank and this is just more example, this is a really great book about tree ring science by Valerie Truet. Contrary example is the xylotech or xylaria which hosts collections of preserved plant specimens. Each volume is a box made of a particular species wood its spine is covered with the corresponding bark and its sides are composed with various tree cuts horizontal slices of branches, cross sections of trunk samples of sapwood, mature wood, heartwood inside you'd find an assortment of anatomical parts seed capsules, roots, leaves, buds, flowers and wax models of its fruit annotations noted its properties, its habitat, preferred soils and use so this itself is a way of like not just thinking of data as something digital on a screen each of these is a datum that's included in a box it is kind of like a data repository in a way. If you think across disciplines data constitutes so many different things I'm not trained as an anthropologist but I was in an anthropology department for the past four years there just thinking about how field work yields the cultivation of just even interview transcripts for instance or ephemera one picks up in the field these actually constitute data data does not have to be digital. Another way the tree becomes sources of data is in the whole world of algorithmic botany which has resonances in computer science and the arts there was actually some of you might know the School for Poetic Computation which is down in West Beth, down in West Beth they had just a couple of months ago a class, a whole class on algorithmic botany where people are exploring patterns in nature and distilling plants down to the very basic morphological forms that define what it means to be a tree and then also exploring the fractal nature of tree growth and whether that might have some implications for forestry for instance or botany as you can see there's actually an article in forestry looking kind of fractals in tree crowns for instance so all the myriad multi-disciplinary applications of algorithmic botany again is another manifestation of trees as data and then if we scale up we could look at the challenges of mapping trees and forests as explored by this really great article from Cindy Lin a couple years ago in eFlex architecture about how to make a forest all the really political subjective decisions about where to put a point on a map of a forest considering data are not objective manifestations of an external truth they're actually driven by nationalist enterprises, by subjective choices, aesthetic choices really great article looking at how complicated mapping really is and forests and when they're contested in particular some of you might also know the work of Bobby Petrusco who's a landscape architect used to be at the GSD and now just came to Penn last year he does a lot of great work using really GIS and mapping as an art form to show all the different visual technologies, sensor technologies the complicated and beautiful ways that we can map forests again to show how complicated it actually is to determine what constitutes a forest the final section and this is short is the tree as a communicative network so there has been and I'm sure you've heard of this a lot of talk in recent years of the distinctive fungal or floral intelligences scientists have learned that trees respond to a host of stimuli energy resources they respond to light obviously minerals and water to mechanical stimuli to touch to soil structure, humidity, temperature, atmosphere, gas composition and various biotic signals including even the presence or absence of nearby plants predators or diseases plants can remember particular stresses like drought or extreme temperature or exposure to radiation and they've evolved their own means of interspecies communication again I'm not sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here you've undoubtedly heard of the widewood web an underground network of mycorrhizal fungi that connects the roots of plants and trees transferring water, carbon and nutrients sending chemical warnings of attack and either nurturing desirable neighbors or sabotaging invasive species invasive neighbors that is chemical, hormonal and electrical signals serve as communication media and an organic mesh network in a way we could call this whole fungal system I also want to think about how trees draw pollinators and other doulas like squirrels into their networks connecting senders and receivers and delivering seeds and how they serve as a networked medium of communication for others for other species that is like with bears leaving marks of their scent on the tree as a substrate the tree is a medium for them to mark their territory in addition I'd like to consider how trees withdraw how they might refuse communication wondering if there are any trees that we could say are actually asocial they don't want to interact with other people and what that might mean especially if the tree kind of I'm anthropomorphizing it but some of the more romantic tree communication books I've read essentially describe it as a tree knows it's dying so it kind of cuts itself off from others so that it's not extracting nutrients and resources that it should be giving to the next generation again that sounds very human like ascribing all this benevolent agency to the tree but it's a story about kind of what's happening chemically perhaps some of the historical and contemporary AI-infused work on forest soundscapes can also shed some light or rather cast an ear on these interspecies ecologies prompting us to consider what we can learn not only through our other senses but also through other communication signals that might escape our humanly realm of perception so there's some interesting EU-wide project going on right now between foresters and digital humanists looking at how you can map capture and map forest scapes I'm not sure it's appropriate to say that these floral and faunal communication networks are governed it is helpful to think about governance when we imagine how these are boreal and botanical systems can serve as models for human-made communication networks as we see in Tika Brains work some of you might know she teaches at NYU and I forget what the program is called in Tandon in this engineering school a lot of work combining organic things botany and technology and kind of creative tech and also the various projects that existed in the wet networks exhibit at the Queens Museum seeing how we can learn from the root structures the forms of leaves from various species of plants and how they might teach us something about how we could actually build technological networks you probably have heard that if we were to look at a map of an efficiently designed transit system it maps on to the root that a slime mold would have followed throughout on a map of that same terrain so here maybe there's something we can learn from the base morphologies as well and planning not just communication networks but other forms of infrastructures which again is a planning and maybe an architectural challenge also so here we're getting at the end trees are media both immediate and ancient ephemeral and endlessly enduring they're rooted in our material world archiving its geologic and climatic paths and branching toward different potential futures their survival and ours requires that we think about how our digital worlds are built in part on sylvan resources how our need for speed and efficiency and ubiquitous connectivity comes at sometimes at the expense of leaves and weeds our cords and cables are entangled with roots and vines however wirelessly ungrounded we might imagine ourselves to be but I also want to wonder what implications these various projects I just shared with you might have for urban and architectural design perhaps for the engineering of infrastructures or the programming I hope that each of the branches we followed here evoked some potential design applications and I hope we can discuss some of those in the discussion afterwards I'm still searching for how to connect these various branches back to a rhetorical trunk of some sort to write hopefully a book about this to consider what it is about trees that lend themselves to mediation their verticality, their rudeness, their fractal morphology and how those qualities facilitate various forms of communication broadcast digital transmission through nodes and lines buds and leaves and branches and meshy roots thank you thank you for that wonderful talk I learned so much about trees and I will never see them in the same way again kind of building upon something you touched on in your talk you talked about writing from the me who we are and where we are and we've seen this in other disciplines as well thinking about auto-theory or auto-history and in your book which we agreed in preparation for this event but when you're talking about dashboards as subversive interfaces you talk about critical interfaces that introduce productive frictions or meaningful inefficiencies that prompted their users to slow down so how do you do what you do and how can you say a little bit more about your methods and how slowness and friction comes in how you prepare your objects and subjects for research sure that's a great question so being interdisciplinary is a challenge it kind of creates if anybody has any aspirations for an academic career advisors will probably tell you it's very dangerous to explicitly define yourself as an interdisciplinary person because you're going to be held to the standards of the multiple fields you're trying to cross so it does create additional obligations because you have to read really deeply and talk to people across those different fields so that's one way that actually requires me to slow down reading that I would have if I were I will say I realize this isn't a cone of silence because this is being recorded it's going to be placed online at some point but one thing I found when I was in an anthropology department for a few years is I would sometimes review manuscripts or read things for potential use in class and I would find that anthropology was sometimes right about I don't know a city kind of a park in a city or a particular design experience not really acknowledging in the field itself there's a discourse there are publications in those fields so there are plenty of people in various disciplines in the academy who really only read the journals in their field and sure you can that's maybe valuable knowledge to people within that field they're still making a contribution I just find it really frustrating reading those types of things because I think that their work could actually be much improved and more valuable if you actually look into things that you're writing about so that's one way like choosing to be interdisciplinary and essentially assigning myself a much heavier reading list and a water swath of field work I'd also say the difficulty of these past two years which I think you and I talked about I've talked about with everybody the fact that some people feel like they're just coming out of a long period of lethargy I realize long COVID is a thing actually compelled a bit of slowing down I thought I was just going to power through and try to keep up all the things I promised to people while also transitioning to a new city and job but I ultimately realized that learning a new landscape figuring out what actual spatial and community resources are there and finding think thought partners in those places isn't something you can just drop in or helicopter in that is requires a slow building of relationships and trust are infantilizing but there was also a tweet that went around a couple days ago of a prize winning novelist who was saying that when he was in grad school somebody cornered him a party and wonder why he's so prolific and he said that's because this was the first and only party I'd gone to throughout my entire grad school experience and I realized right then that I would never go to another one because my secret to productivity is not going to parties not socializing it sparked a whole debate online I realized like how talking to people hanging out with people going to see art taking walks being surprised by the notices I see posted on a telephone pole you know I was one of the examples I used here but I have thought of several moments of epiphany have come to me over the years by just actually reading the stickers on a telephone pole or learning about interesting events that you're not going to find on social media that are just posted with a little tear off tag on a utility pole or a community message board in a food co-op for instance where you do research data wherever presents itself to you in your ambient and quotidian environments I mean that's another thing yeah I think I'll stop there yeah no I love that and also the point that you raise about thinking with community right thinking with other people and sometimes with people or trees yes yeah I will pass the mic on yes thank you as well for the dense presentation very interesting I must say we do know the text on Cloud and Field when working with students we're always asking to kind of make a field guide at some point also some students present here today have read the text at some point and make this field guide so I kind of see the lecture also as kind of an extended field guide with many examples of different trees being connected to cultural technological foundation and natural or artificial artifacts and I think we often see these as opposites or this is museum of the natural versus the artificial but in a way I think we're more interested in I think we can't hear you be closer to the mic sorry sorry sorry so I think rather as looking as them as opposites where they meet each other and kind of messy hybrids it was one example maybe wanted to add the idea of Google Maps on the one hand it's kind of a data tree structure behind it but it also captures nature in a very strange form as Google trees as kind of an accidental hybrid comes out of it you mentioned the example of the tree of life also in your text seeing trees as antennas versus antennas disguised as trees this kind of friction connection and also the tech so I think as architects often still see nature as trees as cat blocks without roots and PNGs to Photoshop and kind of make it cuteness out of nature so I do think there are also practices that start to look at this interesting hybrids and counters we had a lecture last week that does this I'm thinking of Bob Botanik who does this practice in Germany so I think my questions maybe also more questions we are very much interested in working with students in these kind of hybrids and these kind of counters we think of it as a possible answer to not thinking in this opposite as architects often do and look for more connection between those two so how do you think as architects do you think this can help us to better understand certain complexities of our contemporary times and entanglements and shifts and how do you think as architects we can become better at this what kind of possibilities are there maybe also in the media and media ecologies that our technologies bring forward and how they kind of show different perspectives on certain aspects as you clearly did today so yeah, that's my question thank you so if any of you are following the chat dpt's discussion that's just kind of been spinning out of control since last November I think when it was released there are all these discussions about fear of displacement, fear of mass layoffs machines supplanting entire professions but then there's typically the pendulum swings back down to a more moderate position at some point and Tung Hui Hu I'm not sure if any of you know the media scholar published I think it was probably also on eflux last week about arguing that we should instead and this is not novel it's just that eventually we have to get out of the fatalism the panic out of our system before we come back to hopefully a more moderate understanding of most things are all hybrid most things are a balance so where can we actually find ways where computers large language models for instance can enhance or provide ethical and that's another consideration a lot of the prognostications of mass layoffs for instance we're not really talking about the social implications of releasing a new technology into the world but what are actual ethical and exciting and generative collaborations between humans and machines this is something people have been asking for since the the Luddites arts and crafts movement I mean these are not new questions just we keep forgetting that we've asked them before and every time a new technology comes out there's this all or nothing mentality I encourage you to read the piece it's freely available I think it's a Flux architecture tongue we used piece from last week encouraging us to think about what writers, creative practitioners, designers how we can ensure that people are still employed that they're just uniquely I don't want to be human essentialist here but the things that humans are actually really good at can be working in productive tension and collaboration with the technology whatever value system you want to define your practice and then another more concrete example is I've been working with my first dissertation I wrote about Ramkulhasa's Seattle Public Library I went while they were designing the building and wanted to see what a new library building would look like in a city that had just put itself on the global map because of Microsoft and Amazon in an era when those very institutions in the library irrelevant to obviate its existence so that was a really interesting project because it actually got at this we need actually something hybrid rather than assuming that this will kill that to go back to Victor Hugo the book will kill the building but libraries have I think not done a great job but then a great executing but then a great job of thinking about how the digital and the physical free to all useful to everybody and you want people to have myriad ways of actually finding out about it engaging with it so how do you design interfaces catalogs kiosks touch screens paper based materials public art installations that actually provide an entry point for people with various literacy's interests and then helps them to understand how the physical have the digital and the how can you form a form create a form of interoperability in a way between digital infrastructures and physical spaces so just because I've worked with I'm a president board of the New York library count the New York Metropolitan Library Council have worked with a bunch of the libraries here in the city on different design projects over the years so this is a theme that comes up repeatedly especially if you're dealing with a project that maybe has a small but the resources you have and then use technology to supplement where the physical space actually falls short so how do they work with all the limitations the conditionals of the design process how can you again find those affordances of what the digital does well different forms of digitality and what various physical furniture lighting floor treatments wind fenestration any type of design to figure out how the digital and the physical can support whatever your larger public mission might be you see that in the classroom too I don't know that we've done that terribly well during the pandemic but the attempt was especially as we move back into physical space to try to take what we've learned about digital tools during the pandemic era and have them enhance your experience in the live gathering I am not sure if we've possibly all did kind of included some tools from the pandemic in our post pandemic teaching sure okay thank you may I graph something onto that and ask you about is that what you mean by grafting as methods I've heard you speak about it and I think it would be pretty useful for everyone to hear what you mean by that and also relatedly you know with data there's the idea of creating the hyper real right which doesn't really exist so is there you know equivalent to that is there like a hyper natural what does that mean is it important is that what grafting does that's a great question so what is grafting I mean that was a metaphor I used I was invited to write for a lot of my projects come from somebody giving me a prompt if somebody asks me to give a talk I actually ask Andre's like do you give me a tabular rasa it's paralyzing like I need you to give me a keyword I want to know where I could fill a gap in a speaker series or what are students interested in and what I think I can do well match up to what they're interested in so having those it's the same thing like having some design limitations or parameters is often generative in many cases so I was given the task of writing about grafting they want me to write about smart cities in relation to grafting like what do these have to do with one another and then I realize that one of the challenges of a lot of tabular rasa smart city development where you take often I realize that there's that deserts are not empty that was published recently deserts are not empty spaces but one of the tropes was that you take an empty desert space a brown field or something a post-industrial zone and you plop a new city on it without having to care about what was there before there's always something there before it had just been pushed far underground repressed in the memory trauma kind of pushed under a rock for instance probably species and people haven't been displaced so just frustrations with the tabular rasa this is a very modernist you know kind of a grand scale planning way of thinking too so just frustrations were thinking about that and that mentality with smart cities realizing that instead rather than just imposing your really super smart digital intelligence onto a community inventory of what types of intelligences are already there in the the brains and bodies of the people who live there in their vernacular architectural traditions in the trees where they gather the parks they love the desire paths they've carved through certain areas so these are analog accidental ambient forms of intelligence that you can then more responsibly graft your digital tools onto in a way that doesn't dishonor the wisdom that's already there so that was where I thought like that's actually this productive you gave me this assignment and how this we gave me this really productive opportunity to think about how these two terms relate to each other and then I realized it was a good metaphor because this I was actually a little nervous about writing this book the city is not a computer because most of it is drawn from pieces as you had mentioned I mostly published my work in open access venues I write mostly for places journal which is a public scholarship venue mostly peer-reviewed journals that require you to pay $100 to rent an article for a day or 10,000 to own that article I'm slightly exaggerating I wanted to I try to prioritize openly accessible venues just because I write about libraries which are all about making knowledge accessible I should actually live that in my practice too but this book was drawn on pieces that were already out there in the world freely accessible I was like why does that need to be a book I was invited to turn it into a book and then people asked on twitter people said like a book is a different reading experience and online you can add new material you can put the different independent projects in relation to each other in a way that they can speak to each other in a way that you wouldn't find if they were atomized kind of blog posts or something so I started to think about grafting again there are so many different traditions to grafting you can go to industrial economy industrial agriculture where it's just like a efficient science it's all about no care not minimal care for kind of the health of the tree or the quality of the fruit it produces just about how can we get volume and then there are other traditions where grafting is a craft it's like bonsai kind of or really knowing and communing with the different identities of things you're grafting together and that's what I wanted to do the more the latter than the former so I thought about grafting this understanding of just to deal with what new you're adding and how to responsibly put it in relation to what's already there and then how to turn that into a book where I'm taking all these individual pieces I've done grafting on a bunch of new stuff and finding ways to make the whole kind of healthier more vibrant the sum of its parts I love that and you know I've seen it happen in the book where you know you would reference something in a dated chapter and we'll say in chapter 2 there are different nuance so there's a true thread the chapter speak to one another okay with that I think we should we should open the floor to question the one back there it's not on okay now you can hear this so you mentioned in your article tree thinking there is this tension between objectification of trees versus maybe romanticizing over romanticizing trees how do you how do you think tree thinking fit into these two polar opposites like for example Microsoft or Google are looking at trees as single data points or objectifying trees as an organism or as a data point basically versus the example that you mentioned about looking at the tree as a living thing it's dying it's disconnecting from other trees to you know to not yeah I guess the question is where does tree thinking lies between these two polar opposites and should we why don't we for example tell Google to do Google like they're good with collecting data for example let them collect data let the artist he can represent the tree as a living in you know representation for example that's a good point I think it also goes back to the hybridity question like the maybe the more responsible keep using that adjective richer more product more useful more hopefully enriching for the people who are doing the work and the people who will be hopefully the beneficiaries of it is a product of hybridity and there I think this is where for example you could this is something that social scientists talk about often we have also gone beyond I think beyond our fetishization of big database approaches to realize that there's certain things that kind of mega scale data text mining that type of stuff can offer and then how you can supplement that with maybe slower more qualitative methods so there was a piece that circulated a few years ago called supplementing big data with thick data concept of thick description where you actually sit somewhere and write deep notes based on really intense observation so this is where maybe like a Google map of trees for instance like the street equity index or the street equity index that I showed you could help to provide a visualization of where the areas of immediate need are or most intense inequity and then that's when you can supplement with people who actually know the community I feel like there's really productive ways that we can supplement data and methodologies to help direct our attention to particular and particular ways and then combine that with maybe smaller scales slower more qualitative methods those methods are not necessarily analog or old school you can still use really interesting kind of new technologies as I mentioned Jennifer Grease's work in citizen science where they're both supplementing big corporate mapping projects in certain areas and then they go in and they apply ethnography they use kind of citizen science sensors in various ways so even using technology can help a community better understand its own interests its own expertise its own needs so it's not to say that one is analog and one is digital I feel like there are productive ways that both the corporate macroscale and the local microscale can be both analog and digital can use tools and they oh the one danger of letting Google do what it does and letting the artist do what they do is sometimes if you let the technologists who maybe are not engaged with what activists marginalized communities artists actually how they actually want to use their work you build software that doesn't serve the end user very well or is actually extractive or exploitative terrible most university enterprise software is I'm sure you all know like canvas and blackboard and things of that sort you should see the craft that we have to deal with as faculty to like put in receipts or order books or book classrooms they're terrible they're built by people who probably don't actually have to do that work realizing that the booking of a classroom is not pure logistics it's based on pedagogy it's based on how you teach things that are not built into the software so this is where I feel like even sure you can maybe let them at some point go off and do their own thing but even in the establishing of the basic parameters of how the software is designed with the data model is for instance with the user experiences this is where I feel like some cross pollination to go to another botanical metaphor here is actually really useful at the various stages in each of these realms of expertise go about their work thank you I'd like to thank you first for your interdisciplinary approach and for presenting the excessive body of knowledge I believe it applies to all of us and it's almost like music to my ears so there is undeniable evidence to warrant the influence of trees on the development of humankind recent findings in regards to arborel fungal and floral intelligences as well as inter-species communication need to be comprehended by humans to allow a production of knowledge rooted in cooperative thinking as opposed to models of dominance you stated this but the anthroposophic movement pioneered by Rudolf Steiner in the 50s has enabled organic and biodynamic agricultural models to serve as alternative farming techniques that nurture the biodynamic cycle in a farm and link organic compost production from limited cattle reserves with monitored cosmic forces and plant life cycles I'm curious to ask how do you see these active solutions and other passive solutions such as the Fukuoka Fukuoka method and as feasible solutions to balance growing consumption demands of the global population with sustainable agriculture and forest practices and also can you please elaborate as to how large metropolitan areas can meaningfully answer the global question of climate change without displaying arboreal smoke screens did you say the last part of that question how cities can namely be addressed across the climate change was the last part yes yes you stated the grafting technique that you used in Canada but how can cities meaningfully answer global climate change also we've talked this morning as to how New York City specifically works on existing trees planted in the city and associates a certain monetary value to trees that are planted in New York City how do you see the interaction of cities and forests and also farms in an ecosystem that we are working on thank you thank you for your kind words those are very big questions the anthroposophic movement is something I really want to learn more about I mentioned going to the warden Escherich home that was one of the stops we took with my dad the guy who lives in the house that looks kind of like a tree house was very much informed by Steiner so that's just mentioning it because it was something that came up again relatively recently and I realized I have to learn more about it but I think that that community even the Luddites we use Luddite as a pejorative that means somebody who's like afraid of or resistant to new things but that's not the case at all it's a principle choice of when you're going to use something or a principle refusal to use something but it doesn't actually fit your values or you think it's not going to be useful because I don't know it's a corporate imposition or a state imposition rather than actually something for which an organic need has arisen so learning from the Luddites learning from anthroposophists learning from various other communities I'm trying to there's lots of work recently learning from forest management from indigenous communities for instance learning from trees as data sources and all these other organic and looking at trees corals sediment samples as repositories to let us know how our predecessors managed forests as well there's probably a lot to learn from there I'm not an expert in Steiner someone I definitely want to learn more about this project but I guess all this to say that we should graft those on to kind of our repository of things and communities and practices we're learning from in how to create a productive form of hybridity of bridging the analog of the digital the legacy practices and innovation I'll give you two more examples now that I'm kind of talking myself into some more examples the shakers are also really interesting I used to live up in Hudson before which is again two hours north of the city before moving to Philadelphia and they have building a new museum in Chatham which prompted me to write a piece for art in America about the Annabel Seldar's design for the new museum but just learning more about them often there's an equation of this the shakers with the Amish I grew up surrounded by Amish people who many of whom do reject technology at a principle the shakers were actually enthusiastic adopters of technology when it served their ethical and spiritual principles so that's another community to learn from they were communist capitalists they kind of found a way to produce this really weird hybrid of being all about communism on the inside capitalism with the outside world to fund their communist kind of communities on the inside another example that I just slipped my head the shakers and then I'll try to think of that one and then the cities and climate change that's the perennial million dollar question I'm not sure I can answer that I will say that I know that Elise and Mario sitting in the front here taught a class on forests I forget where it was a couple years ago oh yes yeah something at the Bartlett so I imagine you have kind of expertise of people teaching whole studios about sustainability to realize the kind of town and this is not novel either but to realize there's not kind of a hard line separating town and country that so much of what powers a city that makes it operate that provides social infrastructures are the forests that are just beyond its official political borders I mean even the pandemic showed how hiking just exploded in popularity in a way provide the building materials for like tall timber construction for instance they're burned for the fossil fuels we use to heat and cool our apartments so just recognizing all of these flows in multiple directions that are promoted by kind of a more regional way of thinking is one way to realize that cities are co-dependent on not in a psycho analytic way but like bi-directional dependence Hello thank you so much for your amazing multi-directional and super fast and enriching experience of your talk I have two questions the first one is whether how are you dealing in your book with if so with hyper romanticization of the tree as something that is always good and fantastic because of trees being like the most beloved entities of botany and yet they take lots of the credit that other species do and I'm saying this in addition to the hyper reunification that you talked about that is part of neoliberal culture but more in relation to trees themselves like how they become of so many different things and whether they're always good I was at a workshop recently interdisciplinary and whatnot and on trees and climate change and and I asked but are trees always good and people were looking at me like well yeah of course like I was like well but it depends no sometimes I don't know gentrification they were like yeah but that's not a bit like so just to get an understanding of how you are dealing with that in your book and then the other one is methodological maybe and I think my feeling is that you have so much material that I wonder how are you distinguishing between the one tree and many trees because once we are dealing with the many and forests but not only maybe parks etc once we deal with the many we get into the more visible let's say social political questions the politics of the collective etc so and it makes projects more situated so I was wondering if you're making that distinction at all and whether you could write two books one for the individual tree the single tree and the other one for trees in common because I honestly think that there are different beasts and we think about forests and the attributes that we assign to forests are performed by like ugly small plants or animals or so they take they take all the credit and maybe it would be fun or interesting to think about them as as ecologies basically so two questions I guess thanks so the first question is about hyper romanticization of trees I think this gets even activists for endangered species have to deal with it's always about the charismatic megafauna so you always people always want to save the elephant but by get it there was actually a great article in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago about I think it was elephant conservation realizing that what part of the organization's goals was to save also the very unattractive not very charismatic species that are integral to the habitats that elephants rely on they're not going to give money to elephants they're not going to give money to I don't know a species we haven't heard of before something that is not photogenic for instance so there this is the challenge the tree also serves as charismatic megafauna you can use it as a signal or as an emblem for a larger enterprise in some cases for public relations purposes it's marketing because it's something that is beloved has positive associations it's almost kind of anthropomorphic it's more in cultivating pathos than the other species and then your ulterior motive is to actually address these more ecological concerns so part of it is my challenge is speaking of trees and communication they are a communication strategy to offer a front an ambassador to actually do more ecologically minded work as long as you realize as long as you rather than reifying the tree recognize that it is actually performing that political role some of the ways that they show the fact that there are so many tree planting campaigns that have failed because we have looked at them as kind of these atomized things you just plant a seed every 5, 10 feet however many it is also contrasting to your question of whether or not the tree is inherently good in all situations there was a great article in places last a couple years ago about how grasslands in particular don't have the same photogenic about romantic painting or painting of but they are just as biodiverse if not more than forests for instance so recognizing the grasslands wetlands that again don't maybe have the same romantic associations aesthetic resonance that forests do still perform vital work and the hybridity the diversity recognizing that we have to have kind of a an assemblage of all these different types of logical cultures and then to your question about the one versus many this again gets at the hybridity I feel like I don't I could write two separate books this one is still nascent enough that's a really daunting idea but I feel like one of the things I want to show is that this is a whole conceptualization challenge not only conceptualizing how do you use the tree as a symbol or an ambassador our tendency to car about the tree is this isolated entity is part of the problem of the failure of street tree planting campaigns of one trillion tree campaigns of not recognizing the regional nature of city forest relations of how infrastructures work showing rhetorically visually to the work of artists different methodologies how it's really hard I don't think the I challenge the interesting challenge would be to show that the individual and the ecology perform kind of mutually supportive roles in both helping us understand how they work in getting the policy and funding support for conserving restoring these ecosystems yeah I think that's hopefully that's good enough for now hi oh you can go ahead probably okay so after having studied trees nature and their historical trajectory so closely how would you define sustainability in your own terms and how do you think your data can lead to achieving that sustainability that you're defining wow that's another really big question like how do you solve climate change no I'm not asking you that but like it's a more personal question I think for you I'm not asking for a solution I think it's more thinking after all of the research that you've done like what does sustainability mean to you and like how do you think your understanding of it is going to have an impact on like the environment or the city like you're talking about so that's great that's great I mean there are plenty of people whose whole body of research is about sustainability resilience and you probably know there's debate over the political what are you saying resilience resilience and yeah I am probably not equipped to offer a definition but it's the one thing that I can maybe offer based on my own history my own areas of practice and expertise is reminding people that some of the projects just based on some of the projects I've done reminding people that like sustaining the information resources you need to perform ecological sustainability practices you also have to sustain the communities around them provide care for the professional communities who actually have the expert knowledge and are going to perform the labor and sustaining the archives to look at historical precedence the data that allows us to understand what works and doesn't so just realizing the sustainability this again only expands the problem which makes it seem even more daunting for archivists and librarians there are quite a few archivists and librarians who are interested in kind of archiving sustainability practices around New York City about sustainability resilience plans for kind of knowledge for information institutions so there if you distribute the responsibility across people in multiple professions all of whom are kind of collectively engage in this larger operation this is like a mesh a mesh of expertise to go back so I think this is part of my challenges you mentioned you called my talk dense some people call my talks like a torrent that's kind of my signature I guess but it's always about expanding the field but realizing it doesn't have to be a solo endeavor that there are ways to build a knowledge commons of people with different areas of professional expertise sustaining one another recognizing that you know care repair maintenance all these types of things maintaining ecological resources human communities aren't all an integral part of the larger enterprise so that's I guess an ambitious response to your question I could have all this also called generous okay that's that's like too and I think I think dense is good we need dense hi first of all thank you for the really rich and dense presentation beautiful trilling so my question is about sustainability protecting the environment generally the mainstream narrative not the scientific the mainstream narrative is always human centered and western driving we protect we protect natural environments because we need them to survive and then the non-human is seen as a passive as an object and the human is seen as the subject so active so my question is can we change this mainstream narrative and create a new one about a future of repair where we understand nature and its languages maybe we give it a legal status and authority we decentralize humans I mean how we researchers can change this mindset is it just about communication the way we communicate with the word around or or open to you yeah well there was there was a you probably saw the stories about the orcas attacking boats and people in the Atlantic kind of perennial collegium somebody had to write an article about the orcas aren't our friends but like do we do the orcas have to be our friends for us to care about them it's kind of a pop culture manifestation of the question you're asking here but I don't mean to be romanticizing indigenous knowledge or extracting indigenous knowledge but I feel like indigenous eco philosophy to political ecology has a lot to offer here there have been some great books published even in recent years that offer examples or explain the value of recognizing looking beyond the human centered there's a long history of this might be before your time but probably 15 or so years ago there was a very popular philosophy called object oriented ontology inspired in part by Bruno Latour Grant Harmon I'm glad we've grown beyond that but that was one proposal of a way to think beyond the human centric but funnily enough the philosophers cultivating the world of object oriented ontology were kind of it was a very ego centric very human centric hero or oriented kind of motive philosophy so there was a little bit of paradox in the way object oriented ontology was actually practiced and the philosophies this is rampant in the academy people do not live the politics they write about very often but in this case that was one attempt to kind of get at some of these issues nature documentaries is another thing people have tried to get us to understand in some cases those are also anthropomorphizing so we relate to other species supposedly to de-center ourselves by looking like hey they're just like us they love each other they mourn when they die etc so anthropomorphizing tends to help in helping us to and kind of encouraging us to identify with other species but I think also considering the whole notion again, indigenous notion of good relations how do we make sure we're in good relations and what defines good is not necessarily from a human ego or anthropocentric view so a former colleague of mine Max Liborin has a book they published maybe two years ago now called pollution is colonialism the book title might not lead you to believe that it's about an entire proposal for a political ecology they also run a lab at a Memorial University in Newfoundland called the Clear Lab that's all about performing feminist indigenous anti-colonial science so they develop a bunch of methodologies like how could you not just say you're anti-colonial feminist but how do you actually develop research practices protocols means of knowledge sharing means of kind of record keeping of dissemination of publication that actually embody those politics so those are a couple examples of places from which we can learn but just the fact that we've tried there have been so many movements to try to de-center the human and then they become fashionable and then waning in popularity indicates that there's people been asking this question for a long time hopefully the ones I don't know though the ones right now are going to solve it but I think the fact that indigenous philosophy has not just been it's not it's fashionable right now in the academy but it has pre-existed its currency within certain kind of fashionable circles so the fact that it has been proof tested it's not it's something it's actually more of a living philosophy than a body of theory if that makes any sense this is one of those cases where I feel like I should have stopped talking five sentences ago but so these are just some examples of people we can learn from this challenge that I think people have been asking about for a long time but maybe some of these recent books can offer a next stage of considering methodologies for this political change so we have we have a few minutes left should we take a we can take a bunch of questions and then oh we have one here okay thanks hi hi Shannon thank you so much for your insight I would like to bring that was an event that I immediately related to when I read your article so the architects and developers in Tokyo probably built the train network across a lot over a lot of years responding to probably a lot of parameters that shape their decisions and a slime mould that probably has no awareness can seems to like follow the same logic and do it in much lesser time do you think tutorial intelligence and just research in this direction can offer an insight into this kind of collective intelligence that can have direct architectural implications is there like a collective intelligence at play a universal logic that applies to problem solving across species that we've not tapped into or properly understood yet yeah there was a couple years ago I read an article called mappings intelligent agents that's looking at the question is how do we think about cartography is something that's not a human directed enterprise what if it's driven by artificial intelligence or by salmon or by slime moulds so how could not just how can we learn from them but also recognizing there's a totally different way of perceiving of experiencing of the ontology of the world if we look at mapping kind of metaphorically defined from other species or other entities perspectives in this case is first of all maybe how to design transit networks how to design other infrastructures but also even the whole idea of the mycorrhizal communication the fact that a wounded tree might reject or withdraw from a community maybe offer some insight into maybe offer some nuance to the discussion of maintenance Caitlin the Sylvie I think is her name wrote a book called curated decay from historic preservation arguing that in some cases if it's not especially if you have like a care a non-charismatic even a charismatic building to go back to that question of charisma maybe in terms of what it means to the society that it's a part of or the larger architectural ecology it's part of maybe actually sunsetting it having a responsible way of bringing something off-line of not repairing it of allowing it to form of managed retreat or decay actually the most ethical responsible course of action so maybe again seeing how individual buildings fit into a larger ecology looking at how they share resources through infrastructures through how funding is distributed what is maintained and what is not maybe that's a way to think about how tree knowledge or burial intelligence could inform design practices I'd also say just even the approach to design itself just the sharing of knowledge of interdisciplinary teams that could be together yeah so that's even the practice of design and thinking about like the interdisciplinary entangled spaces that you are designing that is kind of your end goal those are maybe two stages at which tree thinking could actually be useful but Simon this was truly amazing and I think that the forward of the lecture was very unique there was a sense of layers and the new layers were activating things from the previous ones and also there were all these assemblages of different ways to to understand knowledge from data to affections to histories to societies to networks to biologist to physicalities but I found truly effective in a way fascinating in not only intelligence but enacting intelligence to this display or ecology of ways of being trees and ways of connecting of ourselves and yourself being tree but I found probably unique probably I don't think there's a lecture like this in this room that is is presenting and enacting what the tree or what trees together with others are and how they enacting intelligence I think that there was a moment that was actually fascinating for me is the moment that you compare all this ecology with the smart cities and the smart cities seems to be something as you did with your hand like imposed on other forms of intelligence other forms of existing intelligence that that in the way you explained there were much broader much more complex much more rich and and also much more interconnected with other things and I wonder how what you did today what you presented today and what you you're doing through your work is also questioning the city as the allocation of intelligence and as the allocation of politics and of course this is very noted because the way that you're describing intelligence is distributed it's interspecies or trans species it's multi-colour it's there's many many categories it's happening through many different of the transition in many different forms of materiality something that is difficult to capture by the traditions that have claimed the city to be the space of political action of culture of intelligence and somehow and a school like this founded on the idea you know we have so many things that end with the city you mentioned for instance the publishing house we have here is Columbia books of on architecture and the city we have urban planning urban design urban you know it seems old to me somehow when we see or we are when we see all this unfolding that you brought today as the place where intelligence is allocated or to which it's enacted and where all these rich forms of politics that you talk about today are allocated and somehow I wonder if there's something of critique to the hegemony of the city that could be added to the critique of the of anthropocentrism and this kind of smartness of intelligence yeah absolutely every if any if any of you again have any aspirations to have an academic career but when you have to go pretend you're after six years you need to put together a dossier and you have to reflect on all the work you've done up to that point and pretend that there has been some cases there is in my case there wasn't I had to retroactively invent a logic that unified everything I did and then you have to go through periodic reviews where you have to show how there was some coherence to all the work you produce and like the hybridity of the analog and the digital I like to think about how data logics modes of intelligence ideally scale or interoperate across everything from the scale of the tiny gadget to the furniture we're using to the shape of this room so in a really in a really well designed or effective experience there's some affective intellectual consideration that's actually unifying the choices between the logics and experiences that are shaping everything from the gadget scale to the urban scale to beyond that that resonance isn't always there and I think those points of frictions are the interesting parts where you see where these inefficiencies come into existence that make you aware of the fact that there are different logics operating the frictions actually the value systems that actually infuse these different domains of design so I was asked in a podcast a couple about the book maybe the last two years or so ago like why the city and part of it is because it's like an interesting meso scale entry point to think about because there are so many past dependencies so many infrastructures that are written into funding structures university curricula training programs scale that resonates for all those reasons because there are there's not inertia what I'm looking for there's kind of a concentration of infrastructures of protocols that actually concentrate around the city and there are just existing discourses you can tap into as well but then you can scale up and down from the city to see how a city is actually an ecology of trees and multiple species our city is actually kind of a constellation different interfaces through which people learn how our cities are a part of Megalopoli or larger ecology regional ecologies but it just may be an entry point to some degree yeah but it is interesting how many going back to intelligence how many different kind of disciplinary intelligences reify the city as this kind of atomized scale or or stage of operation when it is really in actuality and if it's done I think responsibly and well we see how it actually these operations at different scales too I think that's our cue we're living over time please join me in thanking Shannon once more thanks thank you