Restoration seeks to return us to some previous moment in time. In the case of ecological restoration, a 9.6 billion dollar industry in the U.S., much effort is made to restore disturbed ground to its native condition. Part of this effort wages war on invasive species and mobilizes violent and xenophobic rhetoric to eradicate anything that grows well in disturbed soil. In our talk, we will discuss our video essay Ecologies of the Unwanted. This work-in-progress creates a visual conversation to challenge categories of natural, native, and non-native and offer encounters with species from an alternative context. Although we concur with the restoration process, we want to critique how the language of restoration asserts blame and crafts an aesthetic of unbelonging for plants and animals. We experiment with new media in video, performance, and projection to shift our aesthetic reactions to unwanted things in nature. The affordances of new and unexpected media offer the chance to disrupt categorization of species into what does or doesn’t belong. This project also confronts the algorithm as a technology for categorizing the wanted from the unwanted. New media art can choose to disrupt algorithmic aesthetics by misusing the tools, seeking imperfection in production, growing art in the disturbed places of technologies. Thinking through unwanted ecologies, we favor a messier and more disruptive state of play across media. By presenting a proliferation of voices, we intend to create a new visual landscape that connects us as humans to all manner of weed, wild, and unwanted, asking: what and whom flourishes in ignored and unwanted places, the drainage ditch, urban creek, wooded lot, alleyway? The sloppy code, the star wipe, the poorly lit and wrinkled green screen?