Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

Bys: Gil-Fournier, Abelardo and Parikka, Jussi

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262547953
• ISBN13: 9780262547956
• Release Date: June 2024
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 324 Pages
• Weight: 1.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"