Living Surfaces

Living Surfaces

Images, Plants, and Environments of Media

About the Book

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.
Read more
Close

Leonardo Series

The Cory Arcangel Hack
Proxistant Vision
Social Media Archeology and Poetics
Ecologies of Artistic Practice
Heartbeat Art
Voicetracks
Virtual Menageries
Control
Living Surfaces
The Future Is Present
View more

About the Author

Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Decorative Carat

About the Author

Jussi Parikka
Decorative Carat

By clicking submit, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Random House's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and understand that Penguin Random House collects certain categories of personal information for the purposes listed in that policy, discloses, sells, or shares certain personal information and retains personal information in accordance with the policy. You can opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information anytime.

Random House Publishing Group