Living Surfaces

Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka

Paperback

$45.00

Paperback

ISBN: 9780262547956

Pub date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: The MIT Press

328 pp., 6 x 9 in, 11 color illus., 31 b&w illus.

MIT Press Bookstore Penguin Random House Amazon Barnes and Noble Bookshop.org Indiebound Indigo Books a Million

eBook

$44.99

eBook

ISBN: 9780262378475

Pub date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: The MIT Press

328 pp., 6 x 9 in, 11 color illus., 31 b&w illus.

Penguin Random House

328 pp., 6 x 9 in, 11 color illus., 31 b&w illus.

Paperback
9780262547956
Published: June 2024
Publisher: The MIT Press

$45.00

eBook
9780262378475
Published: June 2024
Publisher: The MIT Press

$44.99

MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million

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MIT Press Bookstore
Penguin Random House
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
Indiebound
Indigo
Books a Million
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Hive
Waterstones

Description
Author(s)
Praise
Open Access

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.

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.

“An urgent reminder that environmental change affects not only the planet but what we know and can do about it, Gil-Fournier and Parikka invite us to creatively change the world by embracing our 'recursive planetarity' through 'superficial' investigations of ecological aesthetics to expand our limited ecological politics.”
Jimena Canales, author of Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science

“The book proposes a new aesthetic imaginary of the multi-spectral and trans-planar image; one that metabolizes vegetal life and media theory in order to understand how living surfaces become a kind of image-biome registering intensities of light, chemical properties of soil, temperature differentials, and species interdependencies.”
Susan Schuppli, Professor and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, author of MATERIAL WITNESS: Media, Forensics, Evidence