We wanted to share the news that our co-authored book, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (MIT Press) is just out and available. The book addresses a particular kind of an intersection of media studies, visual culture, and environmental humanities across the different scales of cases that structure the book’s chapters from grassroots to the planetary:
There is also an Open Access version available at
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5799/Living-SurfacesImages-Plants-and-Environments-of
Here is also a just released podcast chat about the book:
The publisher is also happy to send review copies to anyone interested in writing about it. (Contact: Judith Bullent at jbullent@mit.edu )
best wishes,
Jussi and Abelardo
About this book:
Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media by Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka
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.
“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
