Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka, Images, Plants and Environments of Media: Living Surfaces (The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 2024) 328 pp. $45.00 Pb. $44.99 eBook. ISBN: 9780262547956
This complex but engaging work conducts a media archaeological analysis of the aesthetics of planetary surfaces, exploring the technological, artistic and cultural practices that respond to, but also shape, those surfaces. The relevance of the work for advancing contemporary understandings of global heating and the intersecting social, technological and ecological crises that comprise it is clear from the outset. The authors acknowledge a synthetic conception of nature entwined with an ecological notion of media, ‘where the natural and the artificial have merged in a broader context of landscape transformations’ (5). The hypothesis of the book is that the surface of the earth has become an ‘environment of images’ (6) and that our understanding of the earth as a surface is linked to the production and distribution of images. Their project is to explore the entwining of images, imaging technologies and the growth and movement of plant life at a planetary scale. In this sense, Living Surfaces engages and extends lively debates from Plant Studies by attending to the intimate entanglement of plant-life, human activity, and technology. Part of this work involves paying attention to the technological regimes that have shaped the surface of the earth in particular ways to serve forms of power. The overlap of the biosphere with the technosphere evidenced across all the case studies included in the book suggests how media images are not mere reflections of the surface of the earth, but are entangled with, political flows of life and matter.
Throughout the introduction the notion of the surface (that of an image, of living matter, of the planet) is interrogated to counter the conflation of surfaces with flatness. Drawing on a deep knowledge of art and media theory, the writers discuss surfaces as sedimented, ‘resonating with media archaeological layers of history’, as landscapes that move, that are dynamic and changing. They establish a key premise for the case studies to come, that the surface is a way to discuss the ‘proximity and merger of vegetal surfaces with media and image surfaces’ (13). Herein lies the crux of the book’s theoretical innovation: if screens have become landscapes in our media, then landscapes have also become screens. To an extent, this recursivitiy has emerged through a long history of imaging, which the authors trace to early plant science. They pay particular attention to the development of photographic imaging and remote sensing techniques that have sought to map and quantify vegetal surfaces and planetary terrain for human use.
The first chapter investigates the ‘material culture of glass’ that developed in the early study of plant life and photochemistry. The authors note that, from the invention of the glass jars developed by Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in the eighteenth century, the observation of plant matter must be understood in relation to a material culture of glass, a culture of ‘containment’. Through detailed examples, the authors show that instruments of scientific transparency are also enclosures. They unpack the paradoxical nature of this enframing: glass is at once transparent, creating an illusion of continuity between the plant and its surroundings, whilst also separating the object under observation in sphere of its own. In this way, Gil-Fournier and Parikka join other theorists in drawing attention to the ways that the ‘agencies of observation’ (see Barad, 2007) are entangled with objects of study within scientific experiments, co-constituting the phenomena, or knowledge, that emerge.
Gil-Fournier and Parikka also argue that the material culture of glass gave rise to ‘a planetary system of circuits and relays for plants’ (53) that was intimately tied to global colonial flows of people and matter. The second chapter focuses on the reactivity of the surface of the plant, especially leaves. This chapter further describes the intimate and entangled relationships between plants and the apparatuses of observation developed to survey plant life. The authors argue that as scientists began to consider plant perception as itself photometric, the two surfaces – vegetal and photographic – merged through the development of a cultural technique whose continuous application characterises contemporary image culture: ‘the ability to form surfaces out of measurements of light’ (59). Through detailed explanations of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century experimental arrangements, the authors trace a ‘material culture of control’ emerging through photometric observation of plant life. These early media techniques for controlling plant life, the authors note, ‘can be traced in agricultural programs, earth observation systems, and models of the earth still in use decades after the two world wars’ (83). Chapter 3 scales out from photochemical experimental arrangements, to consider the notion of planetary life inspired by plant physiology. Focussing on the work of bio-geo-chemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky (1863-1945), the writers show how the notion of the biosphere, the planetary surface, is that of a living film modelled after the surface of plants.
Chapter 4 shifts perspective from plant-life and the experimental arrangements that developed to understand and control it, to the wider technosphere and the acceleration of industrialised agriculture through the twentieth century. They argue that the planetary surface became operationalised through an environment of images. Here the development of global logistics and industrial agriculture is shown to be reliant on image-based technologies. In their critique, the authors build on well-documented arguments concerning the historical continuity of imperialism with agricultural projects but note how imaging techniques turned imperial operations inward to facilitate ‘inner colonisation’. In Chapter 5, the concern with the operationalisation of images leads to an exploration of how knowledge of planetary surfaces becomes synthetic knowledge about a surface of images. That is, the writers track how imaging techniques have shifted such that the notion of ‘ground truth’ has become no longer specific to the surface of the ground as a geographical reference point. Ground truth becomes instead available through a constantly evolving set of relations among environments of images. Chapter 6 is also concerned with images at scale and the way in which the imaging and modelling of vast surfaces, such as the grasslands of the American Midwest, led to militaristic applications. The scale that the authors wish to consider in this chapter is both the scale of the biosphere, but also that of plant life on its own terms, ‘the scale of the vegetal communities that plants constitute and maintain on their own’ (173). Throughout the chapter, the authors give insights into how modelling techniques developed through the discipline of ecology mediate knowledge about plant life for the purposes of environmental management. They consider how the scalar images generated from this data intersect with the self-organisational qualities of plant communities. In this chapter, the authors’ arguments recall the critique of systems theories levelled by Adam Curtis in his documentary, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011). Readers may wish to put the arguments developed in this book concerning the role of images in dialogue with Curtis’ perspective on the Grasslands Biome, also discussed in this chapter. For Gil-Fournier and Parikka, excavating this history of ecology is vital given the military industrial complex’s current interest in ‘plant technologies.’
In the concluding chapter, on light and recursive sensing, the writers return to vegetal surfaces, to leaves, light and images, focusing on the forest biome because forests have become metonyms for the earth. Here the diverse histories of media, agriculture, ecology and technology, along with the complex theoretical arguments developed through the book, coalesce. Simply put, Living Surfaces, offers a deep history of environmental mediation. As the authors note, what is ‘at stake’ is a particular way of ‘knowing’ the earth’s surface(s). The techno-scientific-media project of imaging the earth has operated throughout history on many scales, shaping, and being shaped by, colonial and imperial forces, military and geoengineering projects, and national and international logistics. Understanding the ecology of images that constitute our knowledge of the planet, exploring its relational, recursive, and entangled co-constitution with technology, politics, and organic matter, is vital to exploring the progressive potential of media aesthetics.
Living Surfaces is an impressive work, drawing together a wealth of research from the history of science, technology, agriculture, photography, and media studies with a sharp theoretical approach to understanding how life, matter, and technology co-constitute one another. Rich with illuminating examples and case studies, Living Surfaces constructs a new aesthetics of life, light, media, and planetarity that deserves attention from anyone seeking to better understand human-environment relations and the ecological crises that characterise those relationships at present.
Chloé Germaine, Manchester Metropolitan University
