The vegetable transfer. Plants, crops and the photographic surface

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Contents

In this talk I will present my research on the interweaving between vegetable growth and the formation of images since the experimental practices of Plant Physiology in the last decades of the 19th century. It is an entanglement that characterizes particularly the context of agricultural operations since then. It can be found for instance in the impact of aerial photography in the development of large-scale agricultural programs of the 20th century, or in the technologies known since the 1990s as precision farming, driven by machine vision systems. Or, more recently, it is epitomized in the use of image-based machine learning techniques applied to the administration and prediction of crops.

In all these different contexts the vegetable appears as a green surface whose form and movements are measured and analyzed through techniques linked to visual media. There, then, a remarkable convergence takes place. On the one hand, in the plants, due to processes such as photosynthesis, light is transformed into vegetable matter. On the other, in the media practices considered –analogue and digital imaging, mainly–, light is registered on their photosensitive surfaces. That is, in these situations where visual media are used to quantify vegetable growth, two different forms of inscription of light encounter. A space of possible transfers between them can be considered then.

These transfers will be the main object of the presentation. They will be addressed from the point of view the media theoretical notion of cultural techniques, on the one hand, and from a practice-based approach in the context of media art.

Learning outcomes

Students are acquainted with the doctoral projects from the Winchester School of Art on the border of academic and arts research.

Prerequisites and other requirements

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Literature

Krtilová, K. - Svatoňová, K. (eds.). Medienwissenschaft. Praha: Academia, 2016.

Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Fordham University Press, 2014.

Theory, Culture & Society. 2013. Vol. 30, No. 6. Special issue on “Cultural Techniques”.

Evaluation methods and criteria

The requirement for the award of credit is lecture attendance and submission of a critical review in the Czech language (min. 1 standard pae)by 24.5.2109 to tomdvorak@famu.cz

Note

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher whose work addresses the material interweaving between the contemporary image and the living surfaces of the planet. His practice is based on the elaboration of platforms -installations, devices and workshops- conceived as open mechanisms, where art, knowledge and politics intersect.

His work has been shown and discussed in venues such as Transmediale (Berlin), Matadero Center of Art (Madrid), Galeria Millenium (Lisbon), MUSAC (León), Medialab Prado (Madrid), Laboral Center of Art (Gijón) as well as in Cultural Centers of Spain in Mexico, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

He is currently a PhD student at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, part of the AMT Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group and part time instructor at the European University of Madrid.

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