Living Surfaces

Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Jussi Parikka, Sean Cubitt

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780262378475
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

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

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