Ecology has become a master discipline, a primary lens through which we see and manage the world. In this performance lecture, we meet two of its co-founders, the American brothers E. P. and H. T. Odum, personalities recomposed in an exposition to ask how system ecological schemes have precipitated contemporary consciousness and networks of nature. The ecosystem, a meta-mechanical political ecology that gives us nature as interconnected entities and relational subcomponents, is intimately tied to the Odum brothers’ history, their lives, research, and diagrammatic endeavors. The lecture revisits this history of networked, relational biology: a sibling narrative, mirrored in diagrams; a duplexed to-and-fro between conservation and innovation, the familiar and the esoteric, economy and ecology, systems and chaos, Eugene and Howard.

The participants thank all those who made the Odum Oration endeavour possible. The Odum brothers’ family, friends, colleagues, students, critics and researchers. The Odumite community, generously sharing their experiences, memories and knowledge, and facilitated access to sites and materials. For your enthusiasm, openness and assistance—thank you! transmediale, for giving us the opportunity to develop and present this project at transmediale 2020, and for your their patience, trust, and support along the way—thank you! 

Daphne Dragona, Amelie Buchinger, Lane Peterson, Donna Haraway, Vicky Sutton-Jackson, Amy D. Rosemond, Dorinda G. Dallmeyer, Katherine M. Stein, Terry Camp, Robert Hamlin Jackson & Family, Paul Boshears & Family, James W. Porter, Christopher S. Childs, Katherine M. Stein, Mark T. Brown, Elisabeth (Betty) C. Odum, Mary Odum, Robert T. Walker, Madison Jones, Sharlynn Sweeney, Karin E. Limburg, Dennis P. Swaney, Stewart A. W. Diemont