Jussi Parikka's guest lecture: Environmental Art and Media Aesthetics: Landscape, Light, and Coldness

This talk features some recent work on so-called environmental art and aesthetics even if it shifts beyond questions of “sustainability” to the broader methods in “environmental media”. In media studies and STS, environmental media has become a fi eld of research that investigates both the environmental impact of media technologies and the way in which media participates in framing what is in the first place “environment”, “nature”, and “ecology”. In my own work, I have referred to this as “media natures” (as a hat tip to Haraway’s nature culture).

While this scholarly context, the talk aims however to address it through some recent art and curatorial work such as the collaborative video essay Lumi (with my long-term collaborator Abelardo Gil-Fournier) that will be screened as part of the talk. Lumi was earlier featured at the Lisbon Architecture Triennial as a three-channel installation as well as screened in various festivals and galleries, e.g. transmediale (Berlin) and the Hansard Gallery (UK).

I hope to also nod toward some other work on the arctic and atmospheres and geographies of planetarity. A good recent example is the work of Josefina Nelimarkka, whose new exhibition Arctic Clouds opens in November 2026 in Oulu as part of the EU Creative Capital year. The exhibition is curated by myself with the Athens based studio entropia. These projects and others feature “coldness”, the Arctic as a planetary atmosphere, and landscape as part of considering issues of ecology, light, sensing, and indeed, art methods.

Lumi
2025
Digital Video, 18 mins.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka.
Sound: María Andueza Olmedo.

Lumi is a story of snow and luminence, of reflection and planetary light. The video essay arranges historical photographic datasets through the perspective of an imaginary synthetic intelligence trained for a repainting of landscapes as part of an operation of climate restoration. At the centre of the operation is the albedo: a measure of reflection of light as it hits a surface. Dark surfaces capture light, and heat. Reflection does the opposite. Processing through images of the past becomes an exercise in mapping and restoring light as patterns and reflections, to compute and model disappeared landscapes of ice and snow. Lumi can be seen as a science and climate fiction about a collective intelligence of Artificial Agents that time travel from past photographic images to future programmed landscapes. This intelligence has itself grown out of those moments of light computing its path, together with the landscape computing its growth and preservation. The video is a dataset of snow, ice, and light. It is about the reversal of time and the synthesis of landscapes: once made, then remade.

Bio:

Jussi Parikka is professor of digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. He also holds a research professorship at University of Southampton (Winchester School of Art). He was trained as a cultural historian in Turku but has since worked in various other disciplinary contexts from art to digital design, cinema to media studies. His books on environmental media, digital culture, and media archaeology have been translated to 12 languages. Most recently, he published the co-authored Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and another co-authored volume, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (MIT Press, 2024). He is writing a new book called Abstract Agriculture (MIT Press, forthcoming 2028). Parikka also works as curator, including recently for solo shows by Josefina Nelimarkka (Oulu) and Jiayu Liu (Beijing).