Vita
Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and the founding co-director of the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research unit (AMT). His books include the media ecology-trilogy that consists of Digital Contagions (2007, 2nd. ed 2016), Insect Media (2010) and most recently, A Geology of Media (2015), which addresses the environmental contexts of technical media culture. This topic was continued in the short booklet A Slow, Contemporary Violence: Damaged Environments of Technological Culture (2016). In addition, Parikka has published such books as What is Media Archaeology (2012) and edited various books, recently Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (2015, with Joasia Krysa) on the Finnish media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. He is also the co-editor of Across and Beyond: – A Transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (Sternberg Press, 2016, co-edited with Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing and Elvia Wilk).
Dated from 2019
Fields of research
Media theory and media archaeology
New materialism
Environmental humanities
Artistic practice and media
IKKM Research Project
Environmental Arts/Humanities: Methods for Elemental Media
The project engages with current debates in the environmental humanities from the perspective of media theory and technical media arts. The proposition of the project is that a range of current arts practices that broadly speaking deal with environmental questions (often also coined under the umbrella term “the Anthropocene”) in the context of the current technical media culture are an effective way to broaden the theoretical and methodological horizon of the environmental humanities. Environmental humanities has over the past years developed into an active field of transdisciplinary engagement at the back of earlier formations and individual examples of research. This proposed project is however interested in developing further the media theoretical ways of engaging with questions of environmental humanities and especially through environmental arts as they are practiced in relation to technological culture.
In other words, the project maps the potential in developing the insights in contemporary media theory and art practice in context of environmental humanities and how the already existing discussions from elemental media (Peters 2015) to finite media and environmental resources (Cubitt 2017) and for example environmental arts (Randerson 2018) and many other examples are part of both thematic concern about media contexts of environmental issues and climate change and importantly, part of what can feed into development of methodological work. Indeed, here the already existing body of work in media theory offers a way to link techniques of knowledge (epistemology) with forms of perception and sensation (aesthetics) so as to build a historically rich link where the current debate has already started to tap into.
Hence, my project is interested in artistic projects as humanities and experimental methodologies that deal with questions of materiality, scale and environmental change as they are determined in relation to forms of media technologies from visualisation to data analytics. Issues of environmental observation, perception and tracking are part and parcel of how the current questions of change, agency and culpability are tracked in relation to environmental issues, and the existing work on remote sensing, geospatial intelligence, geopolitics of data and also informational infrastructures form one context in which some of the work has been conducted.
Selected Publications
Books:
(2016) Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, revised 2nd edition. New York: Peter Lang.
(2016) A Slow, Contemporary Violence: Damaged Environments of Technological Culture. Berlin: Sternberg Press. An essay length booklet published in the Contemporary Condition-series. 48 pp.
(2015) A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Electronic Mediations-series. 206 pages.
Edited books and special issues:
(2016) Across and Beyond. Post-Digital: Practices, Concepts and Institutions, co-edited by Jussi Parikka, Kristoffer Gansing, Ryan Bishop, with Elvia Wilk. Berlin: Sternberg Press. 351 pages.
(2016) A special section on “Mediated Geologies” in Cultural Politics-journal (Duke University Press). November/December 2016.
(2015) Writing and Unwriting Media Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048, co-edited by Jussi Parikka and Joasia Krysa. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 328 pages.
Articles in journals and books:
(2018) ”Handmade Films and Artist-run Labs: The Chemical Sites of Film’s Counterculture.” (co-authored with Rossella Catanese). NECSUS – The European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2019 issue. https://necsus-ejms.org
(2018) ”’Visuelle Halluzination von möglichen Ereignissen’ oder : Über Umweltbilder und Maschinelles Lernen” Archiv für Mediengeschichte, p. 151-163.
(2018) “Planetary Memories. After the Extinction, The Imagined Future” in After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(2018) ”Middle-East and Other Futurisms: Imaginary Temporalities in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture.” Culture, Theory and Critique vol. 59: 1, 2018, 40-58.
(2017) ”The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body” Fibreculture-journal, Computing the City-special issue, http://twentynine.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-219-the-sensed-smog-smart-ubiquitous-cities-and-the-sensorial-body/.
(2016) ”Deep Times of Planetary Trouble” Cultural Politics, November 2016 issue. Duke University Press, pp. 279-292.
(2016) “The Signal Haunted Cold War: The Persistence of the SIGINT Ontology” in Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics, eds. John Beck and Ryan Bishop. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2016, 167-187.