Rianne Subijanto

“Botanical Media” offers a comparative environmental history of global communication by conceptualizing media as ecological-material systems. It compares two Malay plants: gutta percha—essential to nineteenth-century telegraphy, and lontar—used for palm-leaf manuscripts. The project situates communication within the entanglements of labor, land, and community, and analyzes the conditions and institutions governing their extraction and use. The project reveals the development of global communication through two enduring and contrasting logics. Gutta percha made possible imperial telegraph networks through regimes of rapid, large-scale extraction tied to colonial expansion. In contrast, lontar sustained systems of knowledge production rooted in continuity, adaptation, and community-based ecological care. Both were global in reach, yet they produced fundamentally different material and social worlds. By recovering these divergent infrastructures, “Botanical Media” reframes media not as immaterial or purely technological, but as inseparable from ecology, labor, and geopolitics. This perspective reveals the historical roots of contemporary environmental crises in communication industries, where extractive practices persist. The project thus highlights the ecological, ethical, and political stakes of how media are built and governed and argues that just and sustainable futures require confronting their colonial foundations while elevating community-centered alternatives.