Dr. Jussi Parikka

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Fellow Profile

Dr. Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is also Docent at University of Turku. Parikka has authored and edited numerous books on digital culture, media history and media theory. Such include interventions into the question of the biological in technological culture (“Digital Contagions” 2007 and “Insect Media”, 2010) as well as books on media archaeology (“Media Archaeology”, 2011 and “What is Media Archaeology”, 2012). In addition he is interested in questions of e-waste, the environmental and its political underpinnings as an aesthetico-technical (“Medianatures”, 2011; “The Anthrobscene”, forthcoming 2014 and “Geology of Media”, forthcoming 2015).

 

RESEARCH PROJECT

On Media Matters: Geophysics and Technological Materiality

During my Fellowship I aim to deepen my research into materiality of media: theoretical and historical excavations into the various and varying definitions of media materialism. Of special interest is how this links to debates in contemporary media theory but in ways that expand the usual definitions of media materialism to include issues of e-waste, geology and geophysics. Hence the link to recent anthropocene-discussions is obvious but besides that, the project is aimed to elaborate some other themes, which tackle with the link to earth sciences and environmental issues.

The theme relates to rethinking “simulations” of the earth as entangled with the materiality of the earth as a resource for media technological culture in the first place. It refers to an onto-epistemology of the earth becoming central as an object and a (re)source of media. Hence this feedback loop of sorts of media and the earth is both an epistemological and ontological issue through which the themes of materiality of media can be connected to political vocabulary and political economy. More broadly, this project is interested in thinking the various traditions in contemporary European theory (German, Italian, etc) in terms of how they can afford new perspectives across the media – political theory-continuum. This raises the question of epistemologies of the material ontology – a question that is underpinned by many overlapping concerns, not least what I call the aesthetico-technical (with a reference to Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic): the technical underpinnings of manners of visibility of the Earth, it’s productivity and temporal layers – both deep times, and projected futures.