The Raft of Crossed Historicities: A Conversation with DIFFRACTIONS

July 05, 2026

DIFFRACTIONS has published The Raft of Crossed Historicities: A Conversation on Imaging the Planetary, an extensive interview with Abelardo Gil-Fournier on the entanglements between images, living and material environments, and contemporary technologies of planetary observation.

DIFFRACTIONS is a collective editorial project exploring intersections between philosophy, art, technology, computation and contemporary forms of power. Through interviews, essays and experimental contributions, the platform brings together artists, writers, researchers and theorists working across these fields. Its extensive archive of conversations includes figures such as Antoine Bousquet, Joanna Zylinska, Harry Halpin, Armin Krishnan, Anna Engelhardt, Rhea Myers, Peter Wolfendale, Mattin, Frank B. Wilderson III, Nathan Schneider and Betti Marenko, among many others.

In the conversation, Gil-Fournier discusses the relationship between artistic practice and theoretical research, the notion of the “living surface” developed with Jussi Parikka, and the possibility of imagining planetary images that do not depend on the position of an external observer. Moving through works including Seed, Image, Ground, Lumi, Mawat and Hacendera, the interview addresses remote sensing and military perception, environmental prediction and restoration, artificial intelligence, materiality and the politics of planetary imaging.

The conversation concludes with Gil-Fournier’s recent research into images and atmosphere, considering waste, noise and other forms of exclusion not simply as residues of visual systems, but as active forces in determining what images allow to appear—or cause to disappear.

Read The Raft of Crossed Historicities: A Conversation on Imaging the Planetary on DIFFRACTIONS