Eduardo Luersen is a media researcher and designer working at the intersection of media infrastructure studies and environmental aesthetics. From 2022 to 2025, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Konstanz, and in 2024 he held a research stay at the Chair of Knowledge Cultures and Media Environments at the University of Potsdam. He earned his PhD in Media and Audiovisual Processes from the University of Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos) in 2020, supported by funding from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). In 2019, he conducted a research visit at the Gamification Lab at Leuphana University of Lüneburg through a CAPES/DAAD grant, and in 2018 he completed a teaching internship at the Chair of Image and Sound Studies at Unisinos. His work has been published in Games and Culture, the International Journal of Film and Media Arts, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, and Gamevironments, among other international journals. He has also co-edited special issues for Fronteiras: Estudos Midiáticos and Digital Culture & Society.

Eduardo’s project as a NOMIS Fellow explores how contemporary computer games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) aspire to create a “digital twin” of Earth by integrating geospatial imagery, real‑time meteorological data, machine vision, and cloud‑based computational pipelines. Rather than focusing on the representational claims to realism of these simulated worlds, the project examines their underlying image‑making logistics: the design protocols, software architectures, and imaging techniques that contribute to producing a plausible, navigable version of the planet. Combining design‑documentation analysis, media‑ethnographic approaches, and the collection of gameplay imagery, the project considers how these global models operate as technical images. It further explores the hypothesis that the rising prominence of climate and nature in games may be less an expression of environmental awareness or a drive toward photorealism than a repurposing of the cultural techniques that first made climate intelligible as a planetary, technically mediated image.