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    Living Surfaces

    Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

    Part of Leonardo

    Author Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Jussi Parikka
    Look inside
    Paperback
    $60.00 US
    The MIT Press
    On sale Jun 25, 2024 | 324 Pages | 9780262547956
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    An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective.

    What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene.

    With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.
    Series Foreword
    Introduction
    1 Forests of Glass Tubes Will Extend Over the Plains
    2The Photographic Surface of the Plant
    3 Photochemical Planetarity
    4 Inner Colonisation and Visual Agriculture
    5 Ground Truths: Environments of Images
    6 Living Surfaces of Measuring Numbers
    7 Into the Forest: Light and Recursive Sensing
    Acknowledgments
    Notes
    Index
    Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher. Initially trained in physics, he holds a PhD in Arts from the Winchester School of Art. His work has been shown and discussed in international venues and exhibitions.

    Jussi Parikka is Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and Visiting Professor at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as well as the Winchester School of Art. He is the author of Insect Media, A Geology of Media, What is Media Archaeology?, and Operational Images and a coauthor of The Lab Book.
    Abelardo Gil-Fournier View titles by Abelardo Gil-Fournier
    Jussi Parikka View titles by Jussi Parikka
    “Living Surfaces is a thought-provoking read for scholars and students across diverse disciplines. Even those outside of media studies will be intrigued by this book’s thoroughly investigated, real-world examples without being overwhelmed by its rich theoretical lineage.”
    —Media Theory

    “Living Surfaces is an impressive work, drawing together a wealth of research from the history of science, technology, agriculture, photography, and media studies with a sharp theoretical approach to understanding how life, matter, and technology co-constitute one another. Rich with illuminating examples and case studies, Living Surfaces constructs a new aesthetics of life, light, media, and planetarity that deserves attention from anyone seeking to better understand human-environment relations and the ecological crises that characterise those relationships at present.”
    —British Society for Literature and Science

    “Living Surfaces examines the Earth as a surface, a medial, ecological, thermal skin that we mostly perceive as an assemblage of images… It is a process that the two authors define as ‘environmental imaging’…. Gil-Fournier and Parikka have been working together for some time, merging theory and practice in texts and art installations. This includes the related Lumi, a video essay in which historical photographic datasets are organised through the lens of a fictional synthetic intelligence programmed to ‘repaint landscapes’ as part of a ‘climate restoration initiative’ – the perfect complement to this excellent book.”
    —Neural Magazine

    “Living Surfaces is an important contribution to ecological media studies, offering a new perspective by positioning plant surfaces as active mediators in media systems, not just passive objects.”
    —Journal of Environmental Media
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    additional book photo

    About

    An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective.

    What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene.

    With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.

    Table of Contents

    Series Foreword
    Introduction
    1 Forests of Glass Tubes Will Extend Over the Plains
    2The Photographic Surface of the Plant
    3 Photochemical Planetarity
    4 Inner Colonisation and Visual Agriculture
    5 Ground Truths: Environments of Images
    6 Living Surfaces of Measuring Numbers
    7 Into the Forest: Light and Recursive Sensing
    Acknowledgments
    Notes
    Index

    Author

    Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher. Initially trained in physics, he holds a PhD in Arts from the Winchester School of Art. His work has been shown and discussed in international venues and exhibitions.

    Jussi Parikka is Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and Visiting Professor at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague as well as the Winchester School of Art. He is the author of Insect Media, A Geology of Media, What is Media Archaeology?, and Operational Images and a coauthor of The Lab Book.
    Abelardo Gil-Fournier View titles by Abelardo Gil-Fournier
    Jussi Parikka View titles by Jussi Parikka

    Praise

    “Living Surfaces is a thought-provoking read for scholars and students across diverse disciplines. Even those outside of media studies will be intrigued by this book’s thoroughly investigated, real-world examples without being overwhelmed by its rich theoretical lineage.”
    —Media Theory

    “Living Surfaces is an impressive work, drawing together a wealth of research from the history of science, technology, agriculture, photography, and media studies with a sharp theoretical approach to understanding how life, matter, and technology co-constitute one another. Rich with illuminating examples and case studies, Living Surfaces constructs a new aesthetics of life, light, media, and planetarity that deserves attention from anyone seeking to better understand human-environment relations and the ecological crises that characterise those relationships at present.”
    —British Society for Literature and Science

    “Living Surfaces examines the Earth as a surface, a medial, ecological, thermal skin that we mostly perceive as an assemblage of images… It is a process that the two authors define as ‘environmental imaging’…. Gil-Fournier and Parikka have been working together for some time, merging theory and practice in texts and art installations. This includes the related Lumi, a video essay in which historical photographic datasets are organised through the lens of a fictional synthetic intelligence programmed to ‘repaint landscapes’ as part of a ‘climate restoration initiative’ – the perfect complement to this excellent book.”
    —Neural Magazine

    “Living Surfaces is an important contribution to ecological media studies, offering a new perspective by positioning plant surfaces as active mediators in media systems, not just passive objects.”
    —Journal of Environmental Media

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    additional book photo

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