Jussi Parikka Seed Bombs 1

Event

DI Webinar – Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton

An Ecoaesthetic of Vegetal Surfaces: On Seed, Image, Ground as Soft Montage
Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton

This talk draws on the collaborative work with Abelardo Gil-Fournier and engages with the video essay Seed, Image, Ground, which was commissioned in 2020 by Fotomuseum Winterthur.

Dr Jussi Parikka’s talk discusses the video as it links to questions of territorial surface and vegetal surfaces of growth, technologies of imaging and such visual practices what Harun Farocki called “soft montage”.

While focused on this video piece that will be “screened” as part of the talk, he will contextualise some of these concerns as part of longer-term research that addresses multiscalar vegetal surfaces in terms of an alternative understanding of the image and which tracks a genealogy of such surfaces from mid 19th century plant physiology to contemporary precision farming and other techniques where the earth surface is considered an image to be operated upon. The broader context of this discussion is the Operational Images and Visual Culture project (2019-2023), funded by the Czech Science Foundation and located at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and a Visiting Professor at FAMU in Prague where he directs the project Operational Images and Visual Culture.

His books include Insect Media (2010) and A Geology of Media (2015). Most recently he published the co-edited (with Caroline Evans) a special issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film (Journal of Visual Culture, December 2020) and the co-edited book (with Tomas Dvorak) Photography Off the Scale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

Twitter: @juspar

Webpage: jussiparikka.net