Online lecture & a discussion with Robert Bobnič

DATE: Friday, 26 November 2021 | 16:00 CET
LOCATION: online stream

Jussi Parikka: On Vegetal Surfaces and Scales of Images

The lecture will discuss Parikka’s work-in-progress research on “vegetal images” collaboration with Abelardo Gil-Fournier as an entry point to an alternative history of visual culture and photography. The talk draws on their recent practice-based engagement, the audio-visual essay Seed, Image, Ground (2020) that will be screened as part of the talk. Hence, questions of artistic methods are central in this respect as well.

Parikka will address how the project develops a genealogy of energetic and material forms of images that have emerged in the contexts of plant research since approximately the 1850s. The authors turn to plants, not only in the broader philosophical sense of the last years of discussions but also in the contexts of research in the modern history of sciences, experimental practices and modelling.

The work Seed, Image, Ground (2020) is part of the Operational Images project, which prompts us to consider the concept of operational and instrumental images in relation to environmental humanities – including addressing techniques of remote sensing, aerial vision and vegetal surfaces. While these relate to current forms of earth observation and thus to core questions about contemporary forms of control and governance through environmental monitoring, they also offer a speculative history that relates to the audio-visual essay and its themes concerning technologies of air, seeding and agricultural surfaces as image surfaces for operational procedures.

Links

• Operational Images and Visual Culture project at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague
• Abelardo Gil-Fournier’s web page
• Forthcoming Weather Engines exhibition (April 2022, Athens)

Jussi Parikka


Photo: Egor Kraft

Robert Bobnič

Cover image: Dorijan Šiško

Production: Ljudmila, Art and Science Laboratory, and Projekt Atol Institute.

With support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture.