Cultural techniques of the green surface agriculture, plant physiology and the planetary living image

Abstract

This research presents a vegetal genealogy of the contemporary interweaving between the surfaces of the Earth and their visual mediations. Based on the media theoretical framework of cultural techniques analysis, it proposes an excavation of an agricultural past in the notion of operational images. To do so, the study explores three specific historical cases where imaging practices were interweaved with the observation and measurement of vegetal growth. First, a large>scale agricultural programme in the middle of the 20th century is analysed in relation to its use of aerial photogrammetry. Second, a series of photographic experiments in plant physiology related to the development of industrial agriculture at the turn of the 20th century is scrutinised. Finally, the notion of the biosphere as it developed as an up>scaled planetary surface after these researches in plant physiology is examined in relation to current material accounts of the image. As a practice>based research, this project is developed as a critical technical practice in the context of media art. In particular, it explores a space of operations that are produced beyond the surface of the screen, exposing material aspects of the current entanglement between imaging techniques and the transformation of the surfaces of the world. In this vein, the aesthetic dimension of cultural techniques is explored through the presented practices. In this regard, the research unfolds the links with agriculture and plant physiology as a series of chains of operations where the visual emerges as a layered interplay of materials and scales. That is, this interplay is explored in a series of installations and screen>based works that address critically the image> based mediation of the surfaces of the Earth in terms of elemental cultural techniques.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jussi Parikka: orcid.org/0000-0002-2248-6377

ORCID for Ian Dawson: orcid.org/0000-0002-3695-8582

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