Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media [Paperback]

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“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.”&llc†