Welcome to the book launch and discussion with artist Abelardo Gil-Fournier and professor Jussi Parikka whose new book Living Surfaces Images, Plants, and Environments of Media is just out with MIT Press.

Diving into the world of plants and vegetal surfaces, Gil-Fournier and Parikka offer an experimental way to understand visual media culture in dialogue with the worlds of biological and ecological life. While “surfaces” have been central to art history and for example modernist aesthetics, this book looks at the different scales of management and control of living surfaces of the planet from biosphere to agriculture, remote sensing to forests as sites of mediation – of visuality and hiding, of obfuscation and targeting. Their approach combines questions of datafication with aesthetics and even (landscape) architecture as they discuss their theoretical and artistic inspiration in surfaces as part of current topics and debates on planetarity.

The event will also feature their new video essay on planetary light. It focuses on how disappearance of ice and glaciers can be described as aesthetics of reflection, the albedo effect. Sound artist María Andueza Olmedo has designed the soundscape of the new video work.

Copies of the book will be on sale while the book is also available as open access through MIT Press site here.

Listen to a recent podcast discussion with Gil-Fournier and Parikka focusing on questions of (living) materiality and the book’s themes here.

The event is organized by Kunsthal Aarhus together with the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies and the Aesthetics Seminar, School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. It is also supported by the Environmental Media and Aesthetics research program.

It's free to attend, but we recommend securing a seat on Billetto.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher based in Madrid (Spain). Originally trained in Physics, he holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art (UK) and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at FAMU in Prague (Czech Republic). His work has been exhibited and discussed in international spaces such as Transmediale (Berlin), Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia (León), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Le Bal (Paris), Fotocolectania (Barcelona), Galeria Millenium (Lisbon), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Strelka Institute (Moscow), MUSAC (León), NeMe Center of Art (Cyprus), Centrjo de arte Matadero (Madrid), Laboral centro de arte (Gijón) as well as in Spanish Cultural Centres in Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

Jussi Parikka is professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University where he is also the director of the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre as well as the co-director of the research program Environmental Media and Aesthetics. His earlier books include Digital Contagions (Peter Lang Inc, 2007/2016), Insect Media (University Of Minnesota Press, 2010), What is Media Archaeology? (Polity Press, 2012), A Geology of Media (University Of Minnesota Press, 2015), The Lab Book (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, co-authored), and Operational Images (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). In addition, he has published several co-edited volumes, such as Photography Off the Scale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Parikka’s books have been translated into 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. His curatorial work includes for example the recent co-curated Climate Engines show that ran at Laboral, in Gijon (Spain), in 2023-2024.