Eduardo Luersen is a NOMIS–eikones Fellow at eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel (Switzerland).
Luersen studied visual arts and graphic design at the Federal University of Pelotas (Brazil), earning his BA in 2010. He completed an MA in social communication at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil) in 2013, and earned his PhD in media and audiovisual processes from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (São Leopoldo, Brazil) in 2020, supported by funding from CNPq. In 2019 Luersen was a visiting doctoral researcher at Leuphana University of Lüneburg (Germany), funded by a CAPES/DAAD grant.
From 2022 to 2025, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz (Germany). In winter 2024, he was a visiting researcher at the Chair of Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments at the University of Potsdam (Germany).
Research Focus
Luersen’s research explores the intersections between media infrastructures and environmental aesthetics. He has written on topics including games and ecology, political geography and digital media, scientific knowledge and speculative design. His work has been published in Games and Culture, International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Gamevironments, and other international journals and anthologies.
His current project examines games that model Earth using geospatial imagery, real-time meteorological data, and machine vision. It focuses on the visual infrastructures — design protocols, software and imaging techniques — employed to render the planet as a navigable, operational technical image. The project explores the hypothesis that the increasing presence of climate-related tropes in games may reflect not only a growing environmental awareness, but also a repurposing of the cultural techniques that first made Earth intelligible as a planetary image.
Eduardo Luersen portrait by Alessandro Frigerio.