Anne Burdick and Elise Co, Weaving a Forest X SAMPLER

Weaving a Forest X SAMPLER seeks a material language to represent a forest as a living multi-species organism. The project will bring together computation and the fiber arts to model what forest scientist Suzanne Simard calls the “wood-wide web,” a mycorrhizal network—fungi and tree roots—that carries nutrients and messages between plants.

Mother Tree Project, brought the idea of the “wood wide web” to the public in a compelling Ted Talk in which she evokes empathy for these living systems, bringing them to life as beings that care for one another by sharing food and warnings of danger. In her talk and papers, she uses a network diagram to visualize the evidence she and her team collected, making visible this powerful plant-to-plant connectivity.

Our project will take this network graph and experiment with how it might be embodied through weaving, braiding, knotting, knitting, and stitching with fibers. By using Simard’s forest data to create a collection of test samples and fiber works, we will explore how tangible connectivity might elicit new understandings and generate new form languages for botanical study and data visualization.