• any raw material or mode of expression used in an artistic or creative activity: four pictures were set in the walls.., mosaics, they seemed—but he did not examine their medium closely.
• any physical material used for recording or reproducing data, images, or sound: in the process of registering sounds, the recording medium being transparent ribbon coated with an opaque substance.
• an intervening substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses; any substance considered with regard to its properties as a vehicle of light or sound: the air, which is the medium of musick and of all sounds.
• a pervading or enveloping substance; the substance in which an organism lives; one's environment, conditions of life, or usual social setting: the aetherial medium (wherein all the stars and planets do swim).
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition
64 digital plantations alenda y. chang
the visual commons nina lager vestberg
ice-core media susan schuppli
cryospheric landscapes: on light, media, and coldness
abelardo gil-fournier and jussi parikka
simulating supernovae brooke belisle
in conversation with john durham peters karen m'closkey
immersive worlds and indigeneity alison griffiths
78 media architecture on the horizontal plane dave colangelo
86 spectral sections david salomon 70 opaquing contemplation daniel coombes
94 postscript to brutalist earth bryan norton
100 fossil fabulation rania ghosn
108a tribute to richard weller image credits Upcoming Issues
Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher whose work explores the entanglement of media and matter. With a background in physics and a PhD in art, his practice spans installation, image, and computation. He has exhibited internationally and co-authored Living Surfaces (2024) with Jussi Parikka. He is currently a Leonardo grantee of the BBVA Foundation.
Jussi Parikka is a professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University and visiting research professor at the University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art). He is the author and editor of several books, most recently the co-authored Lab Book (2022), Operational Images (2023), and with Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Living Surfaces (2024).
The surfaces of the planet are made of light. Such light is not only for illumination; it does not simply “make visible.” Light is the intensive force that links the sun and the Earth into a circulation of matter and energy. This circulation is atmospheric, even foundational to atmospheres. Such circulation includes other forces, too. A space of mediation is involved; loops beget loops. Oxygen and ozone cycles emerged during the socalled Great Oxidation period, some two billion years ago, as cyanobacteria became agents of photosynthesis. The fossil layer had to wait until the extensive land colonization by plants during the Devonian period, 400 million years ago, when sunlight “sank” below the surface as fossils and the carbon cycle. Light remakes landscapes across deep time, across surfaces, across loops.
Light involves other agents, too. The large-scale extraction of energy from the Earth’s fossil reserves and its consequences for the planet is the most obvious example of planetary-scale time being burned into an intensive reformatting of the surface and the atmosphere. This loop involves humans. In Anthropocene history, this is no longer the same techno-temporal stack as Natural History (as a knowledge and logistics infrastructure)
ART, DIGITAL AESTHETICS
once was.1 Instead, technical agents, or technical media, are added into the loops: some built upon capturing light, some upon capturing reflections of visible and invisible energy. A technical stack of sensing emerges as the cause and condition of large-scale change.
Our recent book, Living Surfaces, focuses on these interacting loops that become articulated across vegetal surfaces, some at a landscape scale.2 We are interested in the spatial and temporal stabilization of the planet’s vegetal surfaces through image practices. The concept of surface, as explored by Giuliana Bruno, is a space of material tensions shaping image formation and modulating its effects.3 In Living Surfaces, we extend this concept to an environmental scale, although “environmental” is a term that does not explain scale but is implied in multiscalar loops. Images become a layer and a loop that articulate the problem of light in a particular way: they become analytical operators as well as interfaces.4 In other words, an image of a landscape is its potential operationalization – analyzing an image as a landscape surface assumes the possibility of intervention. The photosensitive capture of light, including photography,
and scientific applications like photometric measurement, have occupied a central place in knowledge about vegetal surfaces since the 19th century. However, gradually, remote sensing became at least as significant: the visual and the invisible spectrum of radiation, alongside the “invisual” circulation of light as data.5 Yet another loop.
This essay is about light, remote sensing, and cryospheric landscapes central to planetary loops. Light emerges as a radiant force of energy and information, recirculated as images through material surfaces such as agriculture or forests. Light binds together so-called nature and so-called media. The fabricating function of remote sensing, lidar, and other light media beyond visible radiation has become a backbone for Earth observation and, thus, planetary-scale computation. This technological evolution has been especially significant since the 1970s, with the military use of satellite sensing. This narrative is not so much about a species-level history of humans as it is about a particular military-industrial complex and its role as a central agent in reformatting the planet. Today’s climate crisis introduces an excess of light that “overexposes” the circulation of images and surfaces.
EYES THE ON SKY
MARTIN HOGUE
Martin Hogue is an architect and associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. He is the author of Thirtyfour Campgrounds (MIT Press, 2016) and Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping’s Most Essential Items and Activities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2023). His most recent research explores intersections between film, fieldwork, and place, and he is currently compiling a history of the landscape transect.
“Terra firma may indeed afford a good subject; but from ‘cloudland’ we must derive impressive sentiment.”1
Referring to the series of approximately 100 oil sketches that he produced atop the ridge at Hampstead Heath in North London between October 1820 and September 1822, the celebrated British landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837) noted somewhat dismissively that “my observations on clouds and skies are on bits and scraps of paper.”2 Diminutive in size (think of a paperback novel or even a pack of cigarettes), generically titled, often unsigned, undated, and rarely displayed during the artist’s lifetime, it is hardly surprising that the authenticity of many of these works has been called into question by reputable scholars: genuine article or the product of a skillful imitator?3 As a result, nearly half of what has come to be known as the Cloud Studies remains in such historical limbo that it is impossible to establish a firm count. The impact of this extraordinary series is only further diluted by the fact that the sketches themselves are now dispersed in institutional and private collections around the world; encountering a cluster of these works in a museum or in the pages of an exhibition catalog provides some idea of the artist’s field practice of skying and what Constable, the self-professed “man of clouds,” sought to accomplish over the course of those three fruitful seasons of creative labor.4
While there are curators and collectors who rightfully lament these thorny challenges of identification, it is easy to imagine how Constable himself might have appreciated— and perhaps even been amused by—the relative fluidity surrounding his bits and scraps of paper. Indeed, for the French philosopher Hubert Damisch, the clouds that Constable took such delight in painting “belong to the class of body without surfaces,” an observation that seems entirely in keeping with its subject matter.5 For the 19thcentury writer and art historian John Ruskin, the prospect of mere mortals—even those with Constable’s considerable skill—choosing to avert their gaze from the terrestrial realm and turn their eyes toward the sky represents an explicit attempt to lay bare the “dwelling place of imaginary Gods.”6 Only years or decades removed from the inaugural hot air balloon flight by Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes in Paris (1783) and the first rigorous practice of daily meteorological record keeping undertaken by Luke Howard in London (1803), Constable’s efforts reflected the increasing degree of permeability between the realms of art and science that pervaded the age.7 Even the romantic Ruskin was not immune from such prosaic concerns: describing the sky as “a deep, quivering, transparent body of penetrable air” and “faint veiled vestiges of dark vapour,” he noted insightfully that “before the deliberate process necessary to secure true colours [on the canvas] could be got through, the effect would have changed twenty times over.”8 He was right: despite the advent of photography (1826), clouds and sky would continue to befuddle many landscape artists until Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series (1923–1931).
Describing the system of underlying forces that both shaped and continually altered cloud formations as the “sport of winds,” Howard, a pharmacist and amateur scientist widely recognized as the father of modern meteorology, could just as easily have used the same expression to describe the field practice of skying. The deep capacity for observation and concentration required to identify and commit such fleeting moments to paper could be so physically exerting that few enthusiasts would hesitate to call it a sport.9 Although he dedicated an entire sketchbook to quick watercolor studies of the sky, one pencil study by the British painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), a contemporary and great rival of Constable’s, titled The Western Sky over Hawksworth Moor (c. 1816–18), provides a sense of the urgency of the task at hand.10 Despite his furious scribbling, all the artist was able to accomplish during those few minutes in the field amounted to summary notations like “dark purple,” “blue,” “red,” “darkened shadowy clouds,” and a few squiggly lines denoting the general perspective at the
PAINTING, film
alison griffiths
immersive worlds
and indigeneity
Alenda Y. Chang is an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written extensively about the environmental impacts of digital games, including the 2019 book, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. At UCSB, Chang co-directs Wireframe, a studio promoting creative media practice with investments in global social and environmental justice. She is also a founding co-editor of the UC Press open-access journal, Media+Environment
“By plantation I mean those ecological simplifications in which living things are transformed into resources—future assets—by removing them from their life worlds. Plantations are machines of replication, ecologies devoted to the production of the same.”1
I t is late January 2025, and I am waiting at the Los Angeles International Airport to board a flight to London. A little more than two weeks earlier, a devastating wildfire had broken out in the hills above the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, just to the northwest of LAX, claiming a dozen lives and destroying nearly 7,000 structures over the course of three-and-a-half weeks. These mountainous areas have a long history of fires – since 1925, when the Los Angeles County Fire Department began keeping records for the Santa Monica mountains, at least 343 fires have been logged within the park’s boundaries, most of them small. However, the past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in the severity and scale of fire events, which used to occur in the fall with the coming of the Santa Ana winds that blow from dry inland areas to the coast. Today, climate change seems to have upended even the usual disruptions. Thus, the recent Palisades fire occurred during a historic drought in what should have been the wet season.
With the Palisades and Eaton fires on my mind, I couldn’t help but notice the wellmeaning National Park Service ads that kept flashing on the television screens at my gate as well as the charging kiosk where I stood nursing my old iPhone battery back to life. One showed an aerial image of Channel Islands National Park, not far from where I live, and labeled it “The original influencer.” Another showed a verdant foothill in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area with the exhortation “You belong among these wildflowers.” But the one that stopped me in my proverbial tracks was another image from the Santa Monica Mountains, this time, of a flowerlined hiking trail receding toward the mountainous horizon labeled simply “As seen on TV.” The irony, of course, was that millions of people had, indeed, recently seen these landscapes on their screens, but as they were being rapidly consumed by fire or in shaky, smoke- and ember-filled footage from local news teams of residents trying to navigate their way to safety. Surely, I was not the only one who felt this ecotourism appeal was in poor taste at a time when thousands of Angelenos had recently lost their homes in these areas, as had countless animals that lived in those canyons at the wildland-urban interface. Granted, the public relations strategists at the National Park Service could hardly be expected to anticipate such ironies – or should they? If anything, these now awkwardly situated ads are a testament to the inability of even digital technology to keep up with the rapidly accelerating pace of climate-changeexacerbated disasters.
Between the NPS ads, a separate campaign fluttered by, this time for SAP, a Germanbased company that specializes in providing businesses with the software needed to run supply chains, accounting, human resources, customer services, and so on. As if in response to the Los Angeles fires, one of the ad’s luminous blue panels declared, “A force of nature can’t stop your supply chain when your supply chain is the force of nature” in bold pink and white text. The Santa Monica Mountains are at some remove from the giant port complex that operates at the mouth of the LA River in southern Los Angeles and the neighboring port of Long Beach, but SAP’s ad seemed to reassure once and future clients that the software could withstand abnormally strong wind-fueled infernos even as the older infrastructure of electricity lines and towers, water reservoirs and hookups, roads, and so on are blamed for a range of fire-related problems, from ignition to insufficient firefighting water supply to clogged evacuation routes.2
Gaming, media studies
BRYAN NORTON
POSTSCRIPT TO BRUTALIST EARTH
Bryan Norton is a recipient of the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University and a visiting assistant professor of German at Haverford College. His writings on digital media and the environment have appeared in Aeon, SubStance, Cultural Politics, Journal of Visual Culture, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume titled Technics After Stiegler and author of Planetary Idealism, a monograph under contract with Stanford University Press.
LITERATURE, MEDIA STUDIES
“Does he exhaust the possible because he is himself exhausted, or is he exhausted because he has exhausted the possible?”1
Aspecter is haunting the planet – the specter of extinction. Think tanks, TV series, and countless writers have taken to exploring the harrowing prospect of the end of human life on Earth.2 Scenes of starvation, nuclear holocaust, and AI-driven apocalypse play out on screens, fill the pages of books, and occupy an increasing portion of our collective imagination. Artists use computational tools like Dall-E and Midjourney to produce landscapes devoid of human form. The wealthy elite buy islands and build apocalypse bunkers, hoping to keep these nightmares and the rest of us at bay.
Recent hysteria over the existential risk of AI is most certainly overblown, echoing the messianic mythologies Silicon Valley desperately strives to sustain. But there are also good reasons for listening to the pervasive atmosphere of anxiety that has swept so many across the planet. Images of AI futures are speculative and abstract, but climate scientists depict a future world that is harrowingly concrete. By 2030, more than a quarter of the Amazon Rainforest will disappear. Without drastic measures by the United States and China to reduce CO2 emissions, the lungs of the planet will be reduced to a savanna.
Such devastating portrayals of life on Earth strike an enormous contrast to the serene picture of a Blue Marble that has long inspired ecologists and activists. A number of artists,
The Way of Dinosaurs
Act I: Carnegie Quarry (Exhumation)
In the West, paleontology and mining, two birds of a feather Dinosaurs and fossil fuels were extracted together
The Gold Rush and Bone Wars, a race to unearth Fossilized landscapes, exploited for their worth
Manifest Destiny steamrolled west on steel rail
Staked out mineral rights and land grants at scale
Settlers declared ancestral land a possession free to take Digging up matter that took millions of revolutions to make
Western Expansion built a still world of specimens inside With Andrew Carnegie as one philanthropic guide Slabs of deep time, packed up and shipped in crates East from the Quarry to museums across states
To stamp THE MOST COLOSSAL ANIMAL EVER ON EARTH with his name Camp Carnegie would be Andrew’s claim to fame Diplodocus carnegii was resurrected from below On Independence Day, beginning with one giant toe
Old bones tell of five mass extinctions so far
Of the latest, one dinosaur was cast a world star Dippy! A symbol of the Revolutionary War Pittsburgh: the stage for the star-spangled dinosaur
Act II: Carnegie Building (Manufacture)
The terrible reptile does not stand on its own
A steel beam cast grips the curves of each bone Fossils of bones combined with shellac, iron, and steel Stirred up debate on what was fake and what was real
The steel beast joined together some creatures Sculpting new parts to fill in missing features Upward from there, in vertical integration
A towering Dinomania industrialist creation
Beams and column sections rolled out on repeat As skyscrapers rose up and down the street
Among these, the Carnegie Steel Company towerthe headquarters for his eminent wealth and power
Dark skies, sun up to sun down, laboring without break Workers fed the machine with sweat and much ache
A single holiday they received on the 4th of July
On the day Dippy was found, let the fireworks fly
On a fiery effort to halt exploitation, they bled And went on strike over Independence Day at Homestead Workers demanded plant safety and fair wage For the open-hearth furnace to continue to rage
Act III: Carnegie Museum (Reproduction)
Carnegie’s Palace of Culture was to settle
Social heat bubbling at degrees of molten metal
When Carnegie Steel merged into the largest corporation
The richest man in the world turned to philanthropic donation
His Gospel of Wealth—a handbook for a life of excess— Professed: inequality is essential to progress
Libraries, parks, and museums were The Crowning of Labor or the duty of a man of wealth to his less privileged neighbor
The House That Dippy Built was the robber baron’s view
To fit the large skeleton, the Museum further grew Dippy was the centerpiece of the Grand Staircase
Bringing the world to workers who labor at the base
When the King asked for his own, it was surely no trouble
For the British Museum, they would simply make a double Plaster copies of Dippy were cast from a mold
And repeated for many heads of state to behold
The Hall of Architecture that Dippy stands beside Shaped a plaster world where old masters reside
The factory system and the industrial revolution
Reproduced uneven wealth and mass pollution
Act IV: Carnegie World (Extinction)
A FREE TO THE PEOPLE museum came at great cost
Lands and lives damaged, and many species lost Hell with the lid taken off, carbon out in the air
A trove of toxic harm, what a legacy to bear
After most dinosaurs went extinct, only birds remained
Now, many in turn are taxidermy mounts, neatly framed
In A Fable for Tomorrow, was a spring with no voices the canary in a coal mine to caution human choices
Pipelines and Pipe Dreams: a colossal fracking mess
Calling Natural Gas “Green Energy” puts more under stress
Drilling land in Pennsylvania for remaining carbon stores
Sends more living to museums, the way of dinosaurs
As life is held still, the Earth continues its motion
A world beyond fossil fools is the burning revolution
Birds, people, and critters, all together in mammoth size
A flock of climate action lights up the darkened skies
The Cloud Factory pumping soot out of stacks is removed from service with tiny, mighty acts
Land titles are restructured to leave fossils buried deep
Carbon is tucked in rocky beds and settles back to sleep
Top left to bottom right: Parrot, Crow, Microbe, Oyster, Ant, Lizard, Diprotodon, Platypus, Dingo, Thylacine, Tasmanian Devil, Goat, Pan, Owl, Python, Human, Gecko, Camel, Giraffe, Deer, Duck, Rat, Moth, Snail, Frog 1, Frog 2, Cane Beetle, Dugong, Donkey, Panda, Bee, Silkworm, Vulture, Orang-utan, Bison, Cow, El Toros, Goldfish, Elephant 2, Falcon, Carrier Pigeon, Emu, Cockroach, Fruit Bat, Hyena, Gorilla, Chimp, Blobfish, Cuttlefish, Otter, Dog, Walrus, Walrus/sloth, Sloth-pig-bat, Beast, Lady Beetle, Echidna, Snake, Irrawaddy, Orang-utan, Pangolin, Elephant, Wombat, Quoll, Whale Shark, Polar Bear, Crown of Thorns Starfish, Eel, Albatross, Turtle, Lobster, Sea Creature, Land Creature, Extinction.
IN THE NEXT ISSUE OF
Landscape speaks by way of constant change, rooted in process and evolution – the marks of water along a shoreline, seasonal cycles of symbiosis, a forest floor over time. It’s peculiar in that, as Emerson noted, “its self-registration is incessant.” Yet landscape is also particularly receptive—and generative—to our human narratives, individual and collective, and as such can act as a powerful agent of memory.
In our upcoming issue, LA+ Memory, contributors will explore the power of memory in its many dimensions: physical and metaphysical, personal and collective, embodied and ephemeral. This issue recognizes—and welcomes—that both the concept and act of memory are potent flashpoints in political discourse. Where does memory erupt in these charged times? What can we learn from emergent practices of remembrance and preservation? What can memory held in our environments—on our street corners, in our soils, in our very genetic material—teach us?
