Reviewed by Yuxing Zhang (Yolanda)
Review: Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka’s Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media. Published by MIT Press, 328 pages. Available June 25, 2024. ISBN: 9780262547956: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547956/living-surfaces/
Reviewed by Yuxing Zhang (Yolanda)
The ongoing climate crisis embodies something “unthinkable” (Ghosh, 2016) or is at least not immediately perceptible for an individual to fully confront its scale and multifacetedness. One experiences the world(s) through contact surfaces, like the embrace between the ocean waves and the surfing board, or photos of the Arctic for those who have never set their eyes upon its frozen vastness. Hence, imagining alternatives—e.g., new design visions that are attuned to justice and the Earth (Escobar 2018) or collaborative survival in a time “without the promise of stability” (Tsing, 2015, p. 2)— requires interrogating how fragments of the planetary unfolding at various scales are surfaced, observed, and rendered modellable, if not modulable.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka’s Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media makes a timely intervention in how the material surfaces of the planet have become known and perceived as an environment of images and how imaging serve as a core technique through which one can interpret, measure, and coordinate living environments. The book is situated in the field of media studies while also contributing to visual studies, science and technology studies, architecture, critical studies of data and artificial intelligence (AI), design studies, and cognate fields. The book is not about mass media or “symbolic allegories” of environments (p. 6), nor is it about “plant sentience or media animism” (p. 21). Through meticulously researched cases, spanning from the late 18th century to the present day, Gil-Fournier and Parikka show that images—or, more broadly, cultural techniques involving light, imaging, and modelling—and the understanding of the planet as comprised of material surfaces of various kinds are intricately related and mutually shape one another. At its very core, the book offers a media-theoretical analysis of a two-way continuum: In one, the materiality or material conditions of our world(s) enable or constrain certain living relations, modes of mediation and transformative potentials, and techniques of configuring and control. In the other, vegetal matter and environmental surfaces are simultaneously being framed and (re)produced within “experimental assemblages” (p. 21), where visuality and technical images play a central role.
This book intriguingly broadens our understanding of visual culture—even beyond operational images (Parikka, 2023) and the invisual, data-based image ensembles (MacKenzie and Munster, 2019) that are not necessarily catered for human perception. The surface is arguably the book’s most pivotal concept. They are, in the words of Gil-Fournier and Parikka, “aesthetic and epistemic units with lives of their own” (p. 8). This reading resonates with Alexander Galloway’s (2012) interpretation of the interface, not as a fixed thing or mere software design concept that emphasizes a “user-friendly interface” to smooth out friction, but as a process of translation and an effect of mediation. Surfaces are the grounds through which material relations unfold. At the same time, they are “sites” where planetary processes become known and are experimented with (from the transparent envelope of glass to plantation plots and the biosphere) via various techniques involving technical images (e.g., grids, prescription mapping, and pattern recognition). In this light, surfaces have an interfacing effect. They are the interfaces or contact zones where different world-making projects are brought into contact. Hence, shifting from “being ‘unconscious’ of the surface to seeing in it a broader repertoire of forces—including biological, chemical, and geophysical” leads to the realization that surfaces are “already image-like inscriptions and can unfold stories of conflict, violence, and anthropogenic change” (Gil-Fournier and Parikka, 2024, p. 13-14).
The book consists of seven multiscalar case studies. Chapter one picks up on the material culture of glass. In Joseph Priestley’s experiments in the late 18th century, glass vessels served as an encased chamber to host chemistry processes or the “mini atmospheres” for plants. The glass unit was also a logistical device—or portable “greenhouse,” as exemplified by the Wardian Cases of the early 19th century—that enabled the transport of botanical substances in colonial plantation and trade endeavors. The authors suggest that the dual nature of glass—a nested vehicle affording the passage of light, energy exchanges, and the interaction between exterior and interior—became an epistemic model for understanding the cells that make up vegetal matters, i.e., the endosymbiotic transfer of chlorophyll into the transparent lenticular membranes of plants.
The subsequent two chapters upscale the analysis from the surface of an individual plant to the biosphere. Chapter two focuses on the works of plant physiologists Julius Wiesner and Wilhelm Pfeffer, along with Henderina V. Scott, who pioneered time-lapse photography of plants. The authors show how the parallel between photosensitive plant surfaces and the sensitivity of photographic materials to light was recognized in plant physiology research during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This convergence went beyond merely deploying light-inscription instruments to register plant behavior; it helped popularize a view of the vegetal being as something sentient and dynamic. Chapter three explores Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere, which emerged against the backdrop of planetary-scale techno-cultural “terraforming” processes driven by chemical industries. The authors elaborate on how the “gaseous model of living matter” (p. 109), which interweaves the organic and inorganic across various layers and surfaces of planetary life, relates to the visual techniques that initially mediated the observation of plant growth.
Chapter four zeros in on the Spanish Inner Colonization and extends to the recent development of precision agriculture. The authors argue that imaging techniques (e.g., aerial photography) have long been constitutive to the process in which land surfaces become operative as rational units for planned production, where working populations are managed and zoned landscapes are simultaneously conceived as signal territories. Chapter five analyzes the shift in the concept of ground truth, from being tied to specific physical referential objects to becoming a form of synthetic analytical knowledge, as exemplified by “fake geographies” in contemporary AI culture. Ground truth now operates at the surface of the data-image. It acquires meaning in a nonrepresentational way through a network of continuously evolving relationships among data-driven image environments, devices, infrastructures, and protocols within Earth observation systems.
The last two chapters address a distinct scale: grasslands and forests, or the dynamic ecologies that plants themselves constitute and sustain. Chapter six examines US botanist Frederic E. Clements’ quantitative plant survey methodology. It underscores the connection between image-based techniques and quantitatively informed methods (e.g., the use of photograph-database for the quadrat method) in plant ecology research. Clements’ approaches to the spatial characteristics of plant formations sought to measure environments—or vegetation-covered surfaces—through and by the plant. They were part of a broader trend toward the quantification and management of living environments. This has given rise to sensing-management techniques where vegetal ensembles are treated as biomarkers in fields like military intelligence and surveillance operations. The final chapter examines how light climates create a liminal space between opacity and visibility, and the role of images in mediating light and the environments to be observed—e.g., weather warfare, and photographic computation, which flattens forest tree canopies onto a hemispherical-photographic surface to overlay additional data layers. It also rounds up some of the key ideas recurring throughout the book: the two-way recursion between observation and transformation, the (often unexpected) associations between vegetal phenomena and surface-based inventions, and ecological aesthetics, in which the focus on cultural techniques can shift from analyzing mediations to exploring speculation and alternative possibilities.
Living Surfaces makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature that addresses the co-constitution of media technology and our living environments (see Furuhata, 2022; Gabrys, 2016; Halpern and Mitchell, 2023; Mattern, 2021; Starosielski, 2021). In a strict sense, the approach adopted by Gil-Fournier and Parikka cannot be fully encapsulated under the umbrella of media elemental analysis (see Starosielski, 2019). John Durham Peters (2015) has famously expanded the notion of media to “repositories of readable data and processes that sustain and enable existence” (p. 4), extending beyond human-made artifacts and channels for signal traffic. Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s focus on the surface offers an illuminating and much-needed intervention by showing what is truly at stake in such an expansion: the key is not to interpret everything as media, but rather to understand where mediation occurs, what its effects are, why it matters, and how to drive change through these surfaces or contact zones that condition our specific modes of existence and enable certain forms of (technical, interspecies, and human-environment) interactions.
In terms of the theoretical framework, Living Surfaces expands on cultural techniques and Parikka’s notion of medianatures. Cultural techniques, a term originating from environmental engineering, is now a cornerstone of what is commonly identified as German media theory. It refers to “operative chains that precede the media concepts they generate” (Siegert, 2015, p. 11). It helps to theorize the processual dimension in which media are scrutinized toward their technicity and affordances, which operationalizes differences and conceptual distinctions in the material, symbolic, coded, or discursive realms. Medianatures takes this processual analysis one step further by grasping the “intensive co-determination and co-emergence of the two spheres of natural dynamics and media cultural epistemologies,” which together establish the onto-epistemological conditions that characterize our technical modernity (Parikka, 2018, p. 103; see also Parikka, 2015). Medianatures is a concept that draws inspiration from Donna Haraway’s (2003) naturecultures, which challenges the nature-culture divide and addresses the ways in which humans co-become (in both material and semiotic terms) with their many significant and insignificant more-than-human cohabitants—microbes, insects, birds, dogs, cats, and many others. In Living Surfaces, Gil-Fournier and Parikka focus on the theoretical genealogy mainly in the introduction, striking a balance by touching on it only occasionally in the case-study chapters to prevent the book from being overly theoretical. Nevertheless, the emphasis on processual and situated material conditions that underpin specific media technologies and techniques is evident throughout. Another strength of their analysis lies in foregrounding the agency of the more-than-human. They vividly show how “surface inventiveness” characterizes the vegetal realm, and how “plant expressiveness is transferred onto a surface that becomes an interfacial element,” which inform specific modes of perception, data registration, and managerial procedures that, in today’s context, are connected to machine learning and predictive operations (p. 21-22).
This more-than-human dimension makes the book a unique contribution to discussions on multispecies ethnography and justice in anthropology from a media studies perspective. In the coda, Gil-Fournier and Parikka astutely summarize: “Media are not only concerned with logistical redistribution of the matter taken either as resource or waste but they are also active agents in the transformation of the metabolism of the planet itself” (p. 229). This perspective on media deepens our understanding of design justice and its politics when situated within more-than-human worlds, which extends beyond questions of carbon emissions and the finitude of fossil fuels. It opens the door to interdisciplinary critiques of anthropocentrism, interrogates the exploitative logic underpinning contemporary capitalist resource extraction, and proposes new ways to imagine more sustainable and ethical approaches to human-environment relations (especially from the perspective of visuality and technical images).
Living Surfaces is a thought-provoking read for scholars and students across diverse disciplines. Even those outside of media studies will be intrigued by this book’s thoroughly investigated, real-world examples without being overwhelmed by its rich theoretical lineage. One minor drawback of the book is that a more explicit discussion of scale as an analytical device could have been developed as a separate section in either the introduction or the coda. Scale or scaling is a recurring theme throughout the book, serving both as subject of research focus and a methodological cue (p. 88). However, some questions remain: Is scale primarily associated with units of measurement? Is the framing of the surface itself a scaling operation? Does scale precede surfacing, or vice versa? If the surface is not necessarily a plane-based concept due to its interfacing effects, how should we account for layers—understood not as frictions during expansion, but as depth—when critically engaging with scales? Another potential drawback—perhaps more from my perspective as an emerging media scholar rather than a critique of the book itself—is the need for a more explicit discussion or description of the methodology. In my view, a discussion on the methodologies used in media studies—one that is easily translatable to scholars from other disciplines—or how media studies is uniquely positioned to study the implications of historical and contemporary technologies and ways of knowing the world(s) is much needed.
I highly recommend Living Surfaces to scholars in media studies, science and technology studies, visual culture, environmental humanities, critical data/AI studies, multispecies anthropology, and other related fields. It is also an excellent choice for syllabus design, as each chapter can be read as a stand-alone case study. The book includes 11 beautiful color illustrations and 31 black-and-white illustrations. It is available as open access. It will be an eye-opening and stimulating read for those outside academia who want to better understand how humans engage with the world(s) and consider ways to make meaningful changes. For those in speculative design/design studies or research-creation, this fascinating book pairs well with Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s video essay Seed, Image, Ground, which sharply yet poetically explores the convergence of the military-industrial complex and the cultivation of our environments.
Bibliography
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.
Furuhata, Y. (2022). Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gabrys, J. (2016). Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Galloway, A. R. (2012). The Interface Effect. Polity.
Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Halpern, O., & Mitchell, R. (2023). The Smartness Mandate. Cambridge: MIT Press.
MacKenzie, A. & Munster, A. (2019). ‘Platform Seeing: Image Ensembles and Their Invisualities.’ Theory Culture & Society 36(5): 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419847508
Mattern, S. (2021). A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Parikka, J. (2015). A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Parikka, J. (2018). ‘Medianatures.’ ZMK Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (1): 103-106. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/18701.
Parikka, J. (2023). Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Peters, J. D. (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Siegert, B. (2015). Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real. New York: Fordham University Press.
Starosielski, N. (2019). “The Elements of Media Studies.” Media+Environment, 1(1): https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780
Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot and Cold. Durham: Duke University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Yuxing Zhang (Yolanda) is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Yuxing’s doctoral research examines the convergence of agrifood networks with the platform economy as well as the adoption of algorithm-aided systems in agriculture, environment management, and cultural production. Her research has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Cultural Politics, Roadsides, and the Canadian Journal of Communication.
Email: yolanda.zhang@mail.utoronto.ca
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