Jussi Parikka
Biographic Data
| ID | 136309 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jussi Parikka |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jussi |
| FAMILY NAME | Parikka |
| SIGNATURE | PARIKKA J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2248-6377 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 238 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Narrating Environmental Data
For Helsinki Biennial 2023, we were commissioned to write an environmental audiotour that would narrate the city and its surroundings as sites of environmental sensing and even data. While oriented toward the broader audience, and accessible as downloadable podcasts, the episodes drew on recent years of points in critical data studies as well as experimental practices where performance, narrative, and other poetic methods become involved in outli…
Materiaalisuus – median ja kulttuurin perustoilla
Teksti on suomennos Jussi Parikan vuonna 2015 University of Minnesota Pressin julkaisemana ilmestyneen kirjan A Geology of Media ensimmäisestä luvusta. Teos hahmottelee ekomateriaalisesti suuntautuneen mediateorian käsitteellisiä ja mediataiteellisia ulottuvuuksia. Johdantoluvussa Parikka työstää mediamaterialismiksi kutsumaansa lähestymistapaa ympäristökysymysten (kuten kaivannaisten ja elektronisen jätteen) kautta. Hän esittää, että syvä aika (…
Ecocritique between Landscape and Data
Este artigo discute o Environmental Audiotour – um trabalho de Parikka, Patelli e Wong através do qual arte e tecnologia se cruzam com questões ambientais na Bienal de Helsinque 2023. Os artistas-investigadores exploram tópicos como o aumento do nível do mar que afeta ilhas, como os seres humanos têm impacto no meio ambiente, bem como formas de visualizar dados ambientais. No geral, os autores usam métodos criativos para entender e abordar os pro…
Harun Farocki
Plug-in wind
This article focuses on the role of computational fluid dynamics (CFDs) in architectural and design software. Among other uses, CFDs concern the modeling and simulation of wind that this article approaches as an example of elemental media and as a computationally managed entity implemented into design of environments including different kinds of digital twin platforms. Thus, the article argues that wind and other fluids are moved as software and …
Planetary Surfaces and Computation—A Conversation with Jussi Parikka
In this episode, Jussi Parikka, Professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, joins us to discuss his latest book, Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media, published in 2024. Parikka’s work explores the intersections of media history, ecology, and geology, highlighting how digital infrastructures and media technologies both shape—and are shaped by—natural environments. We delve into how media operates not ju…
The Planet Is a Wrap, the Planetary Is Computation and Its Gaps
This essay addresses planetarity through planetary computation, a term with various uses in design and contemporary philosophy of technology. The text unfolds through the example of the Venta Mærsk ship that in 2018 traveled the so-called Northeast Passage, carrying among its cargo frozen fish. The theme of the artificial cryosphere represents one example of logistical media of planetarity, while the essay expands to discuss planetary computation…
Frameless scans
Between 1750-1753, Giambattista Tiepolo painted the world’s largest continuous ceiling fresco in Würzburg, Franconia, commissioned by Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau. This monumental artwork, spanning 600 square meters, depicts Apollo and the Four Continents. Paolo Patelli’s film project, The Countable Parts of the World, uses a 3D digital model of the fresco to explore historical and media contexts, presenting both as “unimages”. The film project …
Code
Bernard Geoghegan’s Code presents a strong history of how the humanities of the twentieth century worked in close connection with communication and information sciences. As Geoghegan early on argues, while “war” has served as a core narrative thread for much of media historical, archaeological, and theoretical discussions, there is another way to structure the historical periodization of information, management, and indeed code across the twentie…
Vortex
Operational Images
First introduced by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the term *operational images* defines the expanding field of machine vision. In this study, media theorist Jussi Parikka develops Farockiâ s initial concept by considering the extent to which operational images have pervaded todayâ s visual culture, outlining how data technologies continue to develop and disrupt our understanding of images beyond representation. Charting the ways that operat…
Earth as image and operation
In this interview, scholar–curator Bryan Norton discusses new forms of planetary-scale image-making with artist–researcher Asia Bazydrieva (Geocinema) and media theorist Jussi Parikka. While collaborating with Bazdyrieva during the production of Geocinema’s ‘Making of Earths’, a documentary exploring the Digital Belt and Road Initiative in China, Parikka wrote a new book, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (2023). In this study, …
Terra Forma
Terra Forma, by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire, is a cartographic take that links closely to past years of theorization of the Anthropocene and the various prompts to develop methods and theories for more-than-human worlds. Reflecting the deep expertise of the trio of authors in history of science, architecture, and visual design, the book functions as a contribution to experimental mapping and current environmental …
The Smartness Mandate
The past decade—or even longer—has been full of all sorts of variations of “smartness.” Smart cities are likely at the forefront of this trend, while it concerns multiple scales of technological solutions and even solutionism, as many would argue. Whether we have reached peak smartness of corporate and public hype is to be decided (after all, massive new projects such as the NEOM in Saudi Arabia are marketed as “smart,” too), but the repercussion…
Environing Media
Environing Media is one of those smart books that presents interesting case studies while offering a platform for a broader discussion converging with environmental media studies, with a dose of history of science thrown in for good measure. This is an exciting combination of disciplines and methods driven by the realization of the centrality of technological infrastructures, scientific instruments, and mediating discourses for understanding clim…
Climatic Media
It is rare that architecture gets to play a starring role in the convergences between digital media, technology, and artificial weather. Even rarer with an emphasis on East Asia. Yuriko Furuhata’s recent book Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmosphere Control demonstrates the opposite, that the built environment speaks volumes about the emergence of cybernetic models and their influence on the atmosphere as an object of environmental …
Operational Images
A Natural History of Logistics” and Other Studio Briefs
This article addresses the question of the planetary through three practices that relate to design and architectural pedagogy and research as well as the broader context of Anthropocene discussions. From Strelka Institute's Terraforming program to the Terra Forma book by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, and Axelle Grégoire and a discussion of the Royal College of Art's architecture program's studio “Something in the Air: Politics of the A…
Insect media and photography
Among one of the main inspirations for the research behind this Special Issue is Jussi Parikka's 2010 book Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology. In this interview, the guest editors, Nina Mangalanayagam and Louise Wolthers, ask Professor Parikka to revisit some of the book's core issues in relation to digital photography and the current media landscape in general. The conversation also revolves around artificial intelligence (AI)…
On Practices of Images and Measures of Practice
This conversation between Jane Birkin and Jussi Parikka picks up on two recently published books, Birkin’s Archive, Photography and the Language of Administration (Amsterdam University Press 2021) and Parikka’s co-edited Photography off the Scale (Edinburgh University Press, 2021, with Tomáš Dvo?ák). The conversation focuses on some of the media theoretical undercurrents of their two books that feature the photographic image as a central part of …
Measuring photographs
This article investigates relationships between photography and measuring. It outlines main types of visual measurement within scientific photography (such as spectroscopy or photogrammetry) and proposes to broaden the analysis by understanding measuring as a visual cultural technique, which has a particular reach outside scientific institutions and uses. Here it connects arguments from media theory with questions of photography and argues that t…
Critical Zones
Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth is an edited volume emerging from the ZKM (Karlsruhe) exhibition of almost the same name: Critical Zones: Observatories for Earth Politics. While the book is edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, the curatorial team of the exhibition also included Martin Guinard, Bettina Korintenberg and Jessica Menger. The exhibition, although hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and thus mostly shown onlin…
Memory Machines
Through the Memory Machines performance tour conducted in a public library, the authors analyze multisensory methods including immersive performance and walking tours as probes into cultural infrastructures. Combining discussions of media theory and artistic practice, including collaboration with the 00100 Ensemble, the authors present infrastructural performance as an art method for creative infrastructural research
The Operational Loops of a Pandemic
This article analyzes the visual operations of contagions and their material aftereffects. Data visualizations and diagrams have played a key role in the visual culture of the contagion, and this article explores especially two recurring themes: curves and simulations. The article addresses the data diagrams that describe and predict, advise and control actions during the pandemic. The authors argue that these curves and simulations are also cruc…
Introduction
This article functions as the introduction to the Themed Issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as an historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, the authors propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work, that links diff…
What Is Media Archaeology
This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology …
New Materialism as Media Theory
Operative Media Archaeology
Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into 'old media' have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, debates surr…
Zombie Media
This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgo…
Platform Studies' Epistemic Threshold
In recent methodological scholarship on digital games, a strong connection is noted between "platform studies" and media archaeology. While platform studies has its critics, who primarily lament the limitations of the project, a recent spate of publications in the field suggests considerable dynamism in platform studies as the concept is further developed. This article argues that by examining platform studies from the perspective of media archae…
The Container Principle
April 01 2016 The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think by AlexanderKlose. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015400 pp., illus. Trade. ISBN: 9780262028578. Jussi Parikka Jussi Parikka Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Jussi Parikka Online Issn: 1530-9282 Print Issn: 0024-094X ©2016 ISAST Leonardo (2016) 49 (2): 17…
Afterword
This text reflects cultural techniques in relation to other concepts in cultural and media studies by addressing their relation to selected Anglo-American and French discussions. It also investigates the relation of cultural techniques to more recent material and speculative turns. Suggesting that the cultural techniques approaches introduce their own important material dimension to media-specific analysis of culture, the article argues that cult…
Politics of Swarms
Middle East and other futurisms
This article focuses on recent contemporary art of Gulf Futurism and Arab Futurism with a specific geographical focus on the Near and Middle East. Still only occasionally addressed and analysed in contemporary academic discussions, these art discourses and practices can be understood as particular forms of counterfuturisms and cultural politics of imaginary times; they continue the earlier work of Afrofuturism in using an aesthetic repertoire to …
Deep Times of Planetary Trouble
This introduction to the special section on mediated geologies contextualizes the articles that follow within recent discussions concerning cultural politics of the environment, ecological contexts of contemporary media, and debates concerning the Anthropocene. The special section approaches the topics from the angle of media studies and argues for new ways to understand media culture as read through a materials focus: from waste to building mate…
Memory in Motion
How do new media affect the question of social memory? Social memory is usually described as enacted through ritual, language, art, architecture, and institutions ? phenomena whose persistence over time and capacity for a shared storage of the past was set in contrast to fleeting individual memory. But the question of how social memory should be understood in an age of digital computing, instant updating, and interconnection in real time, is very…
Insects and Canaries
This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological question is unravel…
The Operational Loops of a Pandemic
This article analyzes the visual operations of contagions and their material aftereffects. Data visualizations and diagrams have played a key role in the visual culture of the contagion, and this article explores especially two recurring themes: curves and simulations. The article addresses the data diagrams that describe and predict, advise and control actions during the pandemic. The authors argue that these curves and simulations are also cruc…
Ground truth to fake geographies
This article investigates the concept of the ground truth as both an epistemic and technical figure of knowledge that is central to discussions of machine vision and media techniques of visuality. While ground truth refers to a set of remote sensing practices, it has a longer history in operational photography, such as aerial reconnaissance. Building on a discussion of this history, this article argues that ground truth has shifted from a referen…
A Recursive Web of Models
This article addresses contemporary artist-architect Tomás Saraceno and his studio team’s work in the context of art and science collaborations. The text pays special attention to how their artistic practice deals with questions of environmental formations and agency. Besides a context in speculative architecture, this article approaches Saraceno’s material engagement as working objects, borrowing the term from Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s…
Arqueologia da mídia
Um dos fatos mais relevantes das "novas" artemídias [...] é a apreciação pelo obsoleto, pelo velho e pelo analógico. [...] As artemídias que empregam as mais novas tecnologias não se equiparam com as maneiras inovadoras com que as demais escavam velhas ideias [...] como maneira de demonstrar que nossa cultura não é [...] baseada em uma única linha de progresso linear. E se a existência paralela de outra realidade ao lado do digital [...] for tão …
Cultural Techniques of Cognitive Capitalism
This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of 'metaprogramming', a software related organisation practice that offered a way t…
Media zoology and waste management
In this article I will investigate the relations of media and ecology, arguing that the incorporation of nature and ecology as part of the media theoretical discourse should also be connected to the ecological contexts in which theory is being produced. This means a concretisation of media ecology in terms of its focus and topic to take into account the current eco-crisis, from perspectives related to animal studies, electronic waste, and even ge…
Sites of Media Archaeology
This short text addresses media archaeology as a material methodology of investigation of the cultural layers of technology. This materiality of course relates it to the older discipline of archaeology, even if in many cases the archaeology in media archaeology is more conceptual. Having said that, the article proceeds to briefly introduce the emerging practices of media archaeology labs through two examples in Germany and the US as ways to offer…
Earth Forces
This article addresses recent art projects that are discussed under the notion of new materialist aesthetics. This term is used to elaborate connections between these projects and their methods and recent discussions of the nonhuman and posthuman philosophy. The article also elaborates some positions in technological or 'media art' practices that work on hardware and infrastructure but also on the geophysical underpinnings of media. It expands on…
Virality
Lectures
partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manire que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord pralable et crit de l'diteur, en dehors des cas prvus par la lgislation en vigueur en France. Il est prcis que son stockage dans une base de donnes est galement interdit
Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman Leeson's Teknolust
Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Teknolust Jussi Parikka (bio) Abstract The article analyzes the Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film Teknolust (2002) as an alternative take on the visual creation of biodigitality. Arguing that Teknolust can be read as a probe into the infiltration of biodigital creatures in contemporary networks of communication, the article suggests that in the film the figures of sexuality, agency and technolog…
Politics of Swarms
The Spam Book
Sublimated Attractions
The paper focuses on the emergence of Finnish computer culture in the late 1950s. The introduction of computers is studied by using a wide range of source material of popular media, such as commercial and company promotion films, newspapers, popular magazine articles, cartoons and comic strips. The paper argues that the introduction of the new computing technology was deeply experienced with the help of popular media, where the technological capa…
Media Archaeology
Media Archaeology
Media Archaeology
Media Archaeology
This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time…
New Materialism as Media Theory
Operative Media Archaeology
Media archaeological methods for extending the lifetime of new media into 'old media' have experienced a revival during the past years. In recent media theory, a new context for a debate surrounding media archaeology is emerging. So far media archaeology has been articulated together with such a heterogeneous bunch of theorists as Erkki Huhtamo, Siegfried Zielinski, Thomas Elsaesser and to a certain extent Friedrich Kittler. However, debates surr…
What Is Media Archaeology
This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology …
Digital Memory and the Archive
In Ernst’s media theory, archaeology becomes archivological analysis that refuses to stay on the interface level. Instead, it reveals the technological conditions of our contemporary techniques of memory and time. The archivological approach focuses on the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. With an extended concept of the archive, a media archaeological and archivological approach to the past means that media can not be made into “hist…
Zombie Media
This text is an investigation into media culture, temporalities of media objects and planned obsolescence in the midst of ecological crisis and electronic waste. The authors approach the topic under the umbrella of media archaeology and aim to extend this historiographically oriented field of media theory into a methodology for contemporary artistic practice. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of repressed and forgo…
Networks Without a Cause
Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 220 pp., ISBN 978-0745649689 (pbk), £15.99. Geert Lovink is one of the most read network culture critics and organisers. His
Media zoology and waste management
In this article I will investigate the relations of media and ecology, arguing that the incorporation of nature and ecology as part of the media theoretical discourse should also be connected to the ecological contexts in which theory is being produced. This means a concretisation of media ecology in terms of its focus and topic to take into account the current eco-crisis, from perspectives related to animal studies, electronic waste, and even ge…
Insects and Canaries
This text focuses on how to think the visual culture of disappearance – more closely, disappearance of animals. It takes as its starting point the Ernst Jünger novel The Glass Bees from 1957 in order to start an excavation into obsolescence, animals and the ecological crisis. The aesthetic themes of visibility/invisibility are entangled with the ecological questions of disappearance and pollution. This sort of media ecological question is unravel…
Afterword
This text reflects cultural techniques in relation to other concepts in cultural and media studies by addressing their relation to selected Anglo-American and French discussions. It also investigates the relation of cultural techniques to more recent material and speculative turns. Suggesting that the cultural techniques approaches introduce their own important material dimension to media-specific analysis of culture, the article argues that cult…
Virality
McLuhan at Taksim Square
On Designerization of Media Culture in the Age of Software
Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command is an analytical map intended to help both scholars and designers understand the current technological application culture. An earlier version was available much earlier online and is now published in printed form in Bloomsbury’s International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics series. As a nod toward material and media history, the book borrows its name from the famous Siegfried Giedion title Mechanization T…
Cultural Techniques of Cognitive Capitalism
This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of 'metaprogramming', a software related organisation practice that offered a way t…
A Geology of Media
"Media history is millions, even billions, of years old. That is the premise of this pioneering and provocative book, which argues that to adequately understand contemporary media culture we must set out from material realities that precede media themselves--Earth's history, geological formations, minerals, and energy. And to do so, writes Jussi Parikka, is to confront the profound environmental and social implications of this ubiquitous, but har…
Sites of Media Archaeology
This short text addresses media archaeology as a material methodology of investigation of the cultural layers of technology. This materiality of course relates it to the older discipline of archaeology, even if in many cases the archaeology in media archaeology is more conceptual. Having said that, the article proceeds to briefly introduce the emerging practices of media archaeology labs through two examples in Germany and the US as ways to offer…
Archéologie des media et arts médiaux
Dans ce dialogue avec Garnet Hertz, Jussi Parikka argumente pour une archéologie des media qui puisse constituer une méthodologie de recherche universitaire au sein des études des media et des arts médiaux. Suivant cette idée directrice de la construction nécessaire d'une fondation théorique à l'archéologie des media, la conversation aborde les sujets de l'interdisciplinarité, de l'historiographie, de l'art, des nouveaux media et du monde univers…
Computer Science (33 works) · Art (32 works) · Sociology (27 works) · History (16 works) · Visual arts (16 works) · World Wide Web (14 works) · Art history (13 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works)