[Commlist] New book - Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

Jussi Parikka and Abelardo Gil-Fournier wanted share the news that the 
co-authored book, /Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of 
Media /(MIT Press) is out and available.

The book  addresses a particular kind of an intersection of media 
studies and environmental humanities across the different scales of 
cases that structure the book's chapters, from grassroots to the planetary:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547956/living-surfaces/ 
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547956/living-surfaces/>




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/

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