Autographic Design

An ambitious vision for design based on the premise that data is material, not abstract. Data analysis and visualization are crucial tools in today's society, and digital representations have steadily become the default. Yet, more and more often, we find that citizen scientists, environmental activists, and forensic amateurs are using analog methods to present evidence of pollution, climate change, and the spread of disinformation. In this illuminating book, Dietmar Offenhuber presents a model for these practices, a model to make data generation accountable: autographic design. Autographic refers to the notion that every event inscribes itself in countless ways. Think of a sundial, for example—a perfectly autographic device that displays information on itself. Inspired by such post-digital practices of visualization and evidence construction, Offenhuber describes an approach to visualization based on the premise that data is a material entity rather than an abstract representation. Emerson wrote, “Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows, and in his own manners and face.” In Autographic Design, Offenhuber introduces a model for design that emphasizes traces, imprints, and self-inscriptions, turning them into sensory displays. In an age where misinformation is harder and harder to identify, Autographic Design makes an urgent and persuasive case for a different approach that calls attention to the production of data and its connection to the material world.

An investigation of aesthetics and visualizations of planetary surfaces from an experimental media theory perspective. What if every vista, every island—indeed, every geographical feature on Earth—could be viewed as an art object? In Living Surfaces, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka explore how the surface of the Earth has, over the last two centuries, become known and perceived as an environment of images. Living Surfaces features a range of case studies from eighteenth-century experiments with and observations of vegetal matter, photosynthesis, and plant physiology to twenty-first-century machine vision and AI techniques of calculating agricultural and other landscape surfaces. Mapping these different scales of vegetal images, Gil-Fournier and Parikka help us understand core questions that pertain to the artistic and architectural reference points for the Anthropocene. With 42 black-and-white and full-color illustrations, Living Surfaces is an engaging and unique take on environmental surfaces as they come to occupy a central place in our understanding of planetary change.