Forum Lectures #17: Richard Grusin

Arboreal Infrastructures: Trees, Technics, Mediation

In the late 1990s, the heyday of internet enthusiasm in the west, the concept of a "wood-wide web" was coined by botanists and other natural scientists, based upon research showing that trees communicated with mycorrhizal fungi through infrastructural networks that were analogized to the World-Wide Web. But trees are infrastructural in other ways as well. Wood can be seen as forming a kind of internal infrastructure for individual trees and has been used for millennia as infrastructural for building and construction in human societies. More recently trees themselves have been recognized as a key part of green urban infrastructures, particularly in relation to recreation and water management. And of course trees play a huge role in the Earth's climatic infrastructure, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and producing oxygen in exchange. In this lecture I will explore the fruitful relatikons among arboreal and technical infrastructures. In so doing I hope to demonstrate the ways in which technical, arboreal, and mycorrhizal infrastructures are linked by their participation in what I have elsewhere called "radical mediation."

About Richard Grusin

Richard Grusin is Distinguished Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he served as Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies from 2010-15 and 2017-21. He has published numerous articles and book chapters and authored five books: Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991); Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), co-authored with Jay David Bolter; Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America’s National Parks (Cambridge, 2004); Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (Palgrave, 2010); and Radical Mediation: Cinema, Estetica, e Tecnologie Digitali, ed. and trans. Angela Maiello (Cosenza, Italy: Pellegrini Editor, 2017). He has edited or co-edited six volumes of essays, all with Minnesota: The Nonhuman Turn (2015); Anthropocene Feminism (2017); After Extinction (2018); Ends of Cinema (2020); Insecurity (2022); and The Long 2020 (2022). His current research is focused on the arboreal humanities, which he will talk about today.