Arbo Vonderwald was raised on a working tree farm in Rhode Island, on land his family has cut selectively for generations. He learned to read a forest before he learned to read a book. He studied film and media art at Pratt in the 1990s, then spent the next two decades building systems. Special effects rigs that pushed signal back and forth between digital and analog. Software for companies that make physical things. Companies, eventually, when the software wasn't enough.

The Arboreal project began somewhere in the middle of that. A long transmission from a timeline running parallel to ours, where centralized power has already failed and the 7th River runs visible under the pavement again. He calls the persona doing the transmitting The Arborist. The work travels across forms.