One of the more striking passages from Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media describes the modulations of light occurring in forests and their phantasmagoric effects as the eyes slowly become accustomed to darkness. Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka compare such modulations in forests to what Ute Holl (2017) describes as “the flickering between light and darkness in the projection [in which] cinema is aligned with the nervous functions as a series of impulses” (23). For Gil-Fournier and Parikka, the forest is “a place where images are produced, such as dreamy apparitions, hallucinations, or even trance experiences.” A good part of Living Surfaces moves back and forth between the photosynthetic capabilities of plants and the projective processes of cinema. They recount, for instance, Julian Weisner’s gathering of photometric data from plants to describe what he called their “Lichtgenuss”: their reaction or “appetite for light”. More generally, Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s short description of forest trance articulates what could be called a vegetal cinema, describing film technique in ecological terms: “the volume created by the light going through and behind the leaves and the radiance of the surface of the cinema is also what comes to define a media archaeology of the arboreal space of the forest” (206).

This is one of only two direct references to media archaeology in Living Surfaces. Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s entanglement of media technologies with vegetal ecologies acts as a demonstration of how tricky that term has become in recent years. When Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo edited Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications in 2011, they pointed to its heterogeneity while also suggesting that media archaeologists construct “alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection’” (3). The emphasis on alternate history and the losers of media culture are found in the variantologies of Siegfried Zielinski, as well as Thomas Elsaesser’s new film history, Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions, and Anne Friedberg’s work on the connections between film and consumer culture. Even so, media archaeology soon found several complications to the cultural historicisms of Foucault often cited as foundational to its approach. Wolfgang Ernst points to operational short-cuts of historiography in time-critical devices, while Markus Krajewski and Sybille Krämer describe the recursive histories of media. Further, the looming threat of climate change inspires a number of interventions tying media archaeology to the environmental humanities: from John Durham Peters’s account of elemental media as vessels for different forms of life; to Sean Cubbit’s articulation of the world-forming qualities of environmental media; Nicole Starosielski’s work on the ecologies of underground cables and more recently temperature; and Parikka’s own work on the geological deep temporalities materialized in media devices, in outer space, and in the soil. Parikka has also turned his eye to the so-called operational images first described by Harun Farocki, who noted that the use of images in technical operations could be identified in automatic weapon systems and facial recognition software. Parikka extends Farocki’s term to a larger genealogy of the use of images in measurement. For instance, the application of star charts in astronomy to verify observations rather than looking at the night sky directly constitutes a major shift in how we conceptualize visual culture. Work on operative capability of logistics and their impact on art and cultural techniques in Nicole Starosielski’s edited collection with Matthew Hockenberry and Susan Zieger, Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, constitutes yet another evolution of media archaeology, whose implications complicate the field’s traditional centering on the aesthetics of the image and the material mediation of technical devices.

This emphasis on operations is a large part of Living Surfaces as well, and it helps to characterize Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s work particularly as a media artist. On his website, Gil-Fournier says that he explores “the entwining of image surfaces with the living crust of the planet” and sees images “as temporary processes that operate through multiple and varied materialities, while involving different scales.” We can see these operations occurring in real time in his “Landscape Prediction: An Earthology of Moving Landforms,” in which Gil-Fournier links geographical information systems to video prediction software for the purpose of showing how commercial services market the Earth’s surface as an endless stream of images for data mining and commodification. In his brief of the project, Gil-Fournier describes how the project leverages a large database of images, which are appropriated by convolutional neural networks. These networks identify patterns within a sequence of frames that enables the generation of new frames based on the identified pattern. The result is a predictive application for the Earth’s surface that, as Parikka points out, has implications for the trading of financial futures linked to future climate change scenarios: “the images are potential avenues to intervention — whether environmentally focused policy changes or capital investment that terraforms regions in its own image” (299).

Such theoretical and artistic interventions concerning the conjunction between the ecological and the imagistic form the core of Living Surfaces, which the authors describe as a series of media archaeological topoi or, as Huhtamo says, “a recurring visual or discursive theme that get reactivated in different historical and social contexts, prompting a reading that moves forward and backward” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2). The authors tease out the implications of reading surfaces as images, suggesting that the Earth has come to be as a series of visualizations. However, they also invert that paradigm by reading images as surfaces, detailing how photographs operationalized as data intervenes in agriculture. They argue that the “environment becomes a condition of mediation while it is simultaneously shaped by techniques of mediation” (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 17). The operational loop they describe can be dizzying to understand at times, reflecting not only the innovation of their approach, but also the complication of media archaeological concepts as they stretch to describe the techniques appearing in their work. While the questioning of C.P. Snow’s two cultures of science and the humanities has a long history, spanning Latourian actor-networks and the new materialist interventions of Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti, along with larger interdisciplinarity fields and institutions, rarely has this intervention defamiliarized the scholarly terrain for me as much as it does in Living Surfaces. For a good portion of the first half of the book, I struggled to find my theoretical bearings, despite the wealth of references to media archaeology and media-archaeological adjacent research. Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s introduction deftly moves from media archaeology to botany to finance to film to cybernetics to cultural techniques, while their chapters shift from one scale of vegetal surface to another. The closest analogue I could find to Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s multiscalar approach is Benjamin Bratton’s description of the layers of planetary computing in The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Their work could be read as concretizing and complicating Bratton’s description of planetary computing’s “terraforming project covering the globe in subterranean wires and switches and overhead satellite arrays, simultaneously centralizing and decentralizing computing and data storage and the social relations that depend upon them (and vice versa)” (115). Yet while Bratton’s description of terraforming often focuses on computing as a function of software, Gil-Fournier and Parikka’s work emphasizes the active and recursive impact of vegetation in such computing processes. For instance, not only do they focus on the media operations of “inner colonization” in agriculture, but they also show how Vladimir Vernadsky modeled his conception of the biosphere on the biochemical surface of plants. These recursive operations shift from operation to vegetal surface and back again, demonstrating how their interplay challenges our normative descriptions of mediation.

The scope of the authors’ challenge can be found in their interscalar engagements with living surfaces. Their first chapter focuses on the loop between separation and continuity found in the use of glass cases in 17th- to 19th-century science. They outline how Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Joseph Priestly used glass cases to construct de-facto ecosystems and to act as models for understanding the circulation of air in Earth’s environment. The construction of such ecologies enabled Nathaniel Ward to invent a sealed-glass environment that was used to transport plants, insects, and even vegetal diseases across the globe. The glass case acts, for Gil-Fournier and Parikka, as what they call an interscalar vehicle. They get the term from Gabrielle Hecht, who defines it as a “means of connecting stories and scales usually kept apart” and suggests that “what makes something an interscalar vehicle is not its essence but its deployment and uptake, its potential to make political claims, craft social relationships, or simply open our imaginations” (115). In the context of the glass case, the authors show how the interplay of separation and continuity raised important questions about plant metabolism and its transformation of rays of light into a substance that helped them to survive in a vacuum in which animals died. The emergent model of photosynthesis also helped articulate speculations that chloroplasts must have been originally independent organisms which were trapped inside transparent cell walls, like plants living in glass cases. Gil-Fournier and Parikka use the first chapter to show how the interscalar vehicle acts as a recursive loop of techniques, logics, and mediations across scales.

As a work of scholarship, Living Surfaces also acts as a textual interscalar vehicle. The chapters interweave histories and concepts in ways that model the entanglements described by Gil-Fournier and Parikka. The second chapter explores how time-lapse photography participated in visualizing the vitality of plants while also showing how plant surfaces were regarded as technologies. In addition to Wiesner’s research into Lichtgenuss, the authors show how he conceptualized plants as living photographs through the emergent technique of photometry. Photometry is a branch of optics that mathematically describes light as a form of measurement. More broadly, Gil-Fournier and Parikka show how Lichtgenuss belongs in a genealogy of operative images in which, as they quote historian John Tresch, images register “invisible phenomena unfolding over time” (70). They also show how Weisner’s logic finds its apotheosis in the computational management of plant growth in devices like Wilhelm Pfeffer’s clinostat, which slowly rotates plants to change light and gravity sources and manipulate their growth patterns.

The third chapter continues the book’s interscalar travel through vegetal surfaces by looking at the biogeochemical model of life in Verdansky’s biosphere. Many of the problems in Verdansky’s work help Gil-Fourier and Parikka theorize their interscalar vehicles. They see his work, The Biosphere, as “the production of a synthetic layer of tools and conceptualizations that account for the mediating role of the planetary scale as it folds recursively onto surfaces and terrestrial systems” (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 108). Such scalar folding reminds me of a phrase that appears rarely in Living Surfaces but which I believe the book helps inaugurate: media metabolism. Interscalar vehicles also metabolically process surfaces and systems. While most often associated with the biological transformation of food into energy in organisms, metabolism helps describe the processes whereby interscalar vehicles entangle information and biological systems. One of the few references to metabolism in media studies comes from Shane Denson’s work on Post-Cinematic Bodies, in which he describes microtemporal operations in digital technologies as “‘metabolic’ processes, in that they are environmental with respect to subjectivity, altering the interactive pathways or ecological exchange routes that define our material existence” (31). Denson’s focus on subjectivity is only one context in which the living systems described by Gil-Fournier and Parikka operate. As they show in the coda, “metabolism of the planet as a whole,” defines a very different scale for this exchange route, comprising not only subjects and images but also the intersection of concepts like the superorganisms of Verdansky and Clement with that of planetary matter itself (228).

The final four chapters show different contexts for these metabolic exchanges. Chapter four describes how the practice of “inner colonization,” describing 19th-century imperialist projects designed to maximize crop yields in the service of national and export demand; develops into the practice of precision agriculture. Precision agriculture uses data to find the precise amount of sunlight or herbicide needed by various plants but also applies this data to make plants programmable. Chapter five analyzes the concept of “ground truth,” described as a calibration technique for knowledge systems to negotiate the interaction between visual systems and soil. Often used in Geographical Information and Positioning Systems (GIS and GPS), the epistemic history of this technique gradually turns away from materiality towards a data infrastructure that relies on data points caught in loops of reference and digitally stitched-together photomosaics. Chapter six turns to Frederic Clements’s notion of grass as a vegetal superorganism and the emergent practice of phytogeography, a surveying technique that estimated the quantitative abundance of different grass species. While early efforts in surveying grasslands were imprecise, Gil-Fournier and Parikka show how such methods surveyed areas as “pixels” and quantified values enabling various remote sensing and management interventions, including imaginaries of a “programmable” earth that could not only mitigate climate change but also be used in military intelligence scenarios. The final chapter considers the techniques of weather warfare, such as flash photobombing to survey urban areas and seeding clouds to create flash floods, as techniques that recontextualize our scalar images of and material encounters with the Earth. They mention the Malaysian artist Simryn Gill whose characterization of militarized rubber trees that “march in rows” show just how deeply militarized techniques have etched themselves into our planet’s materiality (Gil-Fournier and Parikka 229).

“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 earth itself,” Gil-Fournier and Parikka argue in the coda (229). Each of the chapters show how plants are considered as surfaces and databases, interpellated as computational terraforming processes, and then incorporated into images and concepts of a planetary made uncanny by the transformations inaugurated by these very interventions. Gil-Fourner and Parikka’s turn towards logistics, operations, and scales when engaging with vegetal surfaces continues the transformation of media archaeology from a method into some other kind of analysis. In “Media Archaeology as Symptom,” Thomas Elsaesser suggests that media archaeology reveals the space where the human and machine “interpenetrate […] each other.” He continues that:

[t]he more ‘life’ becomes designed (while reality becomes ‘virtual’ and ‘intelligence’ becomes ‘artificial’), the more ‘art’ has to include ‘non-art’ and be ‘life-like’: glitchy, object-oriented, and un-intended (or: failure prone, thingy, random and contingent) (207).

Elsaesser’s insight is much like Benjamin Bratton’s suggestion that the real lesson of artificial intelligence “will have much less to do with humans teaching machines how to think than machines teaching humans a fuller and truer range of what thinking can be” (72). The more we learn about intelligence, the more we recognize that it, too, is constructed. Whereas Elsaesser shows how the emphasis on materiality in media archaeology is a symptom of a crisis in digital culture, where materials can be fabricated and reconstructed virtually, Gil-Fournier and Parikka show that moving past this crisis means understanding the interpenetration of materials, operations, and metabolisms — a terraforming process operating at multiple scales and open to speculative intervention. They call this process “a recursive planetarity, where ecological aesthetics is the necessary companion to an ecological politics” (230). We might also call it a variantology of the Earth — one less invested in the DARPA project of changing our world into a calculating engine and more focused on how the analyses of a programmable Earth can teach us a fuller range of what media and operations can be.

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