Jussi Parikka
Encyclopedia
Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media
theorist and Reader in Media & Design at http://www.wsa.soton.ac.uk/Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton
)]. He is also adjunct professor of digital culture theory at the University of Turku
in Finland
. Until May 2011 Parikka was the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the founding Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture.
in 2007. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Fibreculture-journal and a member of the Leonardo Journal Digital Reviews Panel.
Parikka has published various articles on digital art
, digital culture and cultural theory in Finnish and English in journals such as Ctheory
, Fibreculture, Media History, Postmodern Culture and Game Studies. His texts have been translated into Polish, Portuguese and Indonesian. He has published three single authored books; in Finnish on media theory in the age of cybernetics
(Koneoppi. Ihmisen, teknologian ja median kytkennät, (2004)) and in English, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007) and Insect Media (2010).
Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus
phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital
systems, and the aspirations for artificial life
in software.
The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology
. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software.
Parikka's with Garnet Hertz co-authored paper Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method was nominated for the 2011 Transmediale Vilem Flusser media theory award.
, media theory, the politics and history of new media
, media archaeology
, new materialist cultural analysis and various other topics relating to anomalies, media
and the body.
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
theorist and Reader in Media & Design at http://www.wsa.soton.ac.uk/Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton
University of Southampton
The University of Southampton is a British public university located in the city of Southampton, England, a member of the Russell Group. The origins of the university can be dated back to the founding of the Hartley Institution in 1862 by Henry Robertson Hartley. In 1902, the Institution developed...
)]. He is also adjunct professor of digital culture theory at the University of Turku
University of Turku
The University of Turku , located in Turku in southwestern Finland, is the second largest university in the country as measured by student enrollment, after University of Helsinki. It was established in 1920 and also has faculties at Rauma, Pori and Salo...
in Finland
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
. Until May 2011 Parikka was the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the founding Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture.
Biography
Parikka was awarded a Ph.D. in Cultural History from the University of TurkuUniversity of Turku
The University of Turku , located in Turku in southwestern Finland, is the second largest university in the country as measured by student enrollment, after University of Helsinki. It was established in 1920 and also has faculties at Rauma, Pori and Salo...
in 2007. He is a member of the Editorial Board for Fibreculture-journal and a member of the Leonardo Journal Digital Reviews Panel.
Parikka has published various articles on digital art
Digital art
Digital art is a general term for a range of artistic works and practices that use digital technology as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation process...
, digital culture and cultural theory in Finnish and English in journals such as Ctheory
Ctheory
CTheory is a peer-reviewed academic journal published since 1996. It focuses on technology, media theory, and culture, publishing articles, interviews, book reviews and "event-scenes." It is edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. The journal is published by the University of Victoria, BC, Canada....
, Fibreculture, Media History, Postmodern Culture and Game Studies. His texts have been translated into Polish, Portuguese and Indonesian. He has published three single authored books; in Finnish on media theory in the age of cybernetics
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...
(Koneoppi. Ihmisen, teknologian ja median kytkennät, (2004)) and in English, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007) and Insect Media (2010).
Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital
Digital
A digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
systems, and the aspirations for artificial life
Artificial life
Artificial life is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986...
in software.
The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology
Media ecology
Media ecology is a contested term within media studies having different meanings within European and North American contexts. The North American definition refers to aninterdisciplinary field of media theory and media design involving the study of "symbolic environment, or the socially constructed,...
. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software.
Parikka's with Garnet Hertz co-authored paper Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method was nominated for the 2011 Transmediale Vilem Flusser media theory award.
Research activity
Dr. Parikka's research activities include continental philosophyContinental philosophy
Continental philosophy, in contemporary usage, refers to a set of traditions of 19th and 20th century philosophy from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and...
, media theory, the politics and history of new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
, media archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, new materialist cultural analysis and various other topics relating to anomalies, media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
and the body.
Areas of expertise
- digital culture, new mediaNew mediaNew media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
and the InternetInternetThe Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide... - cultural theory
- technoculture
- cyborgCyborgA cyborg is a being with both biological and artificial parts. The term was coined in 1960 when Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline used it in an article about the advantages of self-regulating human-machine systems in outer space. D. S...
s and other approaches to the body in cybercultureCybercultureCyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,... - media archaeology
Edited books and special issues
- (2011) Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, Implications. With Erkki Huhtamo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- (2011) Unnatural Ecologies. Media ecology-special issue for Fibreculture 17, co-edited with Michael Goddard.
- (2009) The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. With Tony D Sampson. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
- (2008) In Medias Res. Hakuja mediafilosofiaan. (With Olli-Jukka Jokisaari & Pasi Väliaho). Eetos-julkaisusarja, Turku. [In Medias Res: On Continental Media Philosophy.]
- (2003) Aivot ja elokuva-erikoisnumero Lähikuva 2/2003 (With Pasi Väliaho). [Brain and Cinema-special issue.]
- (2003) Kohtaamisia ajassa - kulttuurihistoria ja tulkinnan teoria. (With Sakari Ollitervo and Timo Väntsi). Turun yliopisto, k & h-kustannus, Kulttuurihistoria-Cultural History 3. [Encounters in Time: Cultural History and Theory of Interpretation.]
- (2003) Mediataide-erikoisnumero Widerscreen 3/2003. (With Katve-Kaisa Kontturi).[Media art-special issue.]
Selected articles
- (2011) “Mapping Noise: Techniques and Tactics of Irregularities, Interception, and Disturbance,” in Media Archaeology, eds. Erkki Huhtamo & Jussi Parikka. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- (2011) “Towards and Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” (with Erkki Huhtamo) in Media Archaeology, eds. Huhtamo and Parikka. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- (2011) "Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions and Foldings" Fibreculture 17.
- (2010) "Sublimated Attractions - The Introduction of Early Computers in Finland in the late 1950s as an Audiovisual Experience". With Jaakko Suominen. Media History 16:3, August 2010
- (2010) "Archaeologies of Media Art - Jussi Parikka in conversation with Garnet Hertz" Ctheory-journal 4/1/2010.
- (2010) "Ethologies of Software Art: What Can a Digital Body of Code Do?" In: Deleuze and Contemporary Art, edited by Simon O'Sullivan and Stephen Zepke. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
- (2010) "Archaeology of Imaginary Media: Insects and Affects." In: Verbindungen/Jonctions 10, Brussels.
- (2009) "Archives of Software: Computer Viruses and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents." In: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Eds. Jussi Parikka & Tony Sampson. Cresskill: Hampton Press
- (2009) "On Anomalous Objects of Network Culture. An Introduction." With T.Sampson. In: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture. Eds. Parikka & Sampson. Cresskill: Hampton Press
- (2008) "Insect Technics." In: (Un)Likely Alliance - Thinking the Environment(s) with Deleuze/Guattari, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 339-362.
- (2008) "Politics of Swarms: Translations Between Entomology and Biopolitics." Parallax vol. 14, issue 3.
- (2008) "Copy." In: Software Studies. A Lexicon. Edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- (2007) "Contagion and Repetition - On the Viral Logic of Contemporary Culture." Ephemera - Theory & Politics in Organization vol.7, no.2, (May 2007).
- (2007) "Fictitious Viruses - Computer Virus in the Science-Fiction Literature of the 1970s." In: SciFi in the Minds Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction. Edited by Margret Grebowicz. Open Court Publishing.
- (2007) "Insects, Sex and Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust." Postmodern Culture volume 17, 2/2007.
- (2007) "Control and Accident: Images of Thought in the Age of Cybernetics." NMEDIAC - The Journal of New Media and Culture vol. 4 no. 1.
- (2006) "Victorian Snakes? Towards A Cultural History of Mobile Games and the Experience of Movement." Game Studies 1/2006. (With Jaakko Suominen.)
- (2006) "Kohti materiaalisen ja uuden kulttuurianalyysia, eli representaation hyödystä ja haitasta elämälle." (With Milla Tiainen). Kulttuurintutkimus 2/2006, 3-20.
- (2005) "The Universal Viral Machine - Bits, Parasites and the Media Ecology of Network Culture." CTheory - An International Journal of Theory, Technology and Culture, 15.12.2005. Translation in Portuguese ("A Máquina Viral Universal", Fileguest 2006 conference catalogue, Rio de Janeiro). The English version also republished in the Spanish Aminima-magazine.
- (2005) "Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens - Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information." Fibreculture, issue 4. A new version republished in 2010 by Thirdsound Press.
- (2005) "Viral Noise and the (Dis)Order of the Digital Culture". M/C Journal of Media / Culture. Vol. 7, issue 6 (Jan. 2005).