Author Description

<b>An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective.</b><br><br>What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In <i>Living Surfaces</i>, 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. <i>Living Surfaces</i> 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.<br><br>With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, <i>Living Surfaces</i> is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.