Shannon Mattern: Arboreal Media

Trees commonly serve as proxies for progress. We count and map them to track climate health and social justice. Their transformation into datafied and computationally fabricated objects offers the promise of more efficient and sustainable construction and communication. But trees — in their organic, knotty, networked forms — also embody different ways of knowing: they encode deep histories, serve as media for material expression, scaffold broad systems of ecological exchange. This talk examines these branching forms of arboreal intelligence.

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council; and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal.