Скачать или смотреть Thijs Biersteker’s Screen Eco-Art as "Arbo-Real" Pedagogy and Publishing Practices

Ahmed Tahsin Shams
Common Ground, 2025
Indiana University Bloomington, USA

In her lecture “The Roots of Contingency: Documenting the Arboreal,” delivered at the Visible Evidence XXX conference, Selmin Kara explored the evolving role of trees in cinema as more than incidental details or scenic backdrops. She noted that early cinema spectators were often mesmerized by the “trembling leaves” and “swaying trees” in the Lumière brothers' films, which inadvertently foregrounded nature’s oblivious yet dynamic presence (Kara 2024). This fascination, Kara argued, was not merely an extension of modernity’s realist impulses but a testament to the enduring allure of contingency—a quality that resists choreographed control and embraces the unpredictable agency of the natural world. Citing Professor Kara, "Arbo-real" networks, such as the mycorrhizal "wood-wide web," reveal symbiotic relationships that challenge hierarchical perceptions of nature and resonate with ecological interdependencies in contemporary media and eco-art. These entangled dynamics align with Biersteker’s installations, which leverage real-time data to visualize the imperceptible rhythms of arboreal life. Kara’s articulation of continuity—relations built on material and technical exchange rather than metaphor—finds practical expression in Biersteker’s Symbiosia, where digital tree rings narrate environmental shifts as sensory artifacts (Kara 2024). Such representations collapse temporal divides, connecting deep ecological time to immediate human perception.