Prior to the workshop day, we sent each of our attendees a set of three texts each of the principal investigators had written thinking about the topic of scale, as a way to get our attendees thinking and inspire them.

In Moss, Empire, Ubiquity, Elaine moves from the micro-scale of moss ecologies and life at the scale of the small to the macro-scales of its colonial histories, mapping not only the movements of specimens across the British Empire but the small, everyday, mundane ways in which moss, in addition to other plant species, was used in imperial projects, from packaging to plantations.

In Scalar Alterity, Tega takes up the matter of the concept by the same name, coined by media theorist Zachary Horton, where technologies like microscopes mediate the scalar leaps required to magnify and view moss. Tega thinks about the limits of our tools in visualizing and presenting moss to the human eye, and thinks about the affordances of digital platforms in visualizing and ‘collapsing’ multiple scales all at once.

Finally, Ahmed thinks through postcolonial and postmodern scholarship to think through mediums and forms of archival documentation - particularly hierarchical and heterarchical forms - as tied and connected to the forms of empire and the modern world-system, and wonders what the metaphor of the bryophyte, in contrast to the arboreal or rhizomatic, might offer in thinking new digital architectures.