Launch events for Insect Media - Berlin and Cambridge

Now that Insect Media is out, I am organizing a couple of events sort of as book launches---with a little help from my friends!

One takes place in Berlin, at the Generalpublic.de cultural venue on Schönhauser Allee 167c ( 10435 Berlin) on March 4, Friday, 7 pm - Shintaro Miyazaki will be interviewing me, and hopefully with drinks and nibbles (there has been talk of some Japanese finger food!). Also the book is on sale there, with a small launch discount.

Even before that, in Cambridge, we are organizing a joint event with Joss Hands whose own book @ is for Activism came out in December as well! This takes place February 22, Tuesday, 5 pm at Anglia Ruskin University at 5 pm. The room will be Helmore 251.

Below, a short blurb about that event which we use to discuss more widely some interesting current and future directions of media studies as well:

'New Directions in Media Studies: Questioning The Digital Turn'.

In their new books Anglia Ruskin lecturers Joss Hands (@ is for activism) and Jussi Parikka (Insect Media) address some of the pressing new issues in Media Studies emerging from the digital revolution in communication technology. This event will act as a book launch, but also offers the chance to address the relevancy of innovative cross disciplinary themes in contemporary Media Studies.

Both books are characterized by distinct theoretical and political perspectives on issues such as the impact of digital networks on collective action, the ontology of politics, economic production, the 'post-human' subject and science-arts interdisciplinarity.

Hands and Parikka will offer short introductions to key themes in their books and welcome questions and discussion over wine and nibbles.

The event is sponsored by CoDE – Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute at Anglia Ruskin, and the campus bookshop John Smith's is offering both books to be purchased during the event.

Insect Media is out!

A great birthday present -- an email from your publisher saying that the book is out! Two days later, i.e. today, I got my first copy of the book, and despite the fact that I barely dare to open it in case I realize the greatest idiocy somewhere on the pages, one has to feel quite happy about this: Insect Media is finally out! After a 1.5 years wait since I submitted the final version, I get to see it turn into a book with nice retro cover, and with the blurb from Eugene Thacker:

"With Insect Media Jussi Parikka offers a theory of media that challenges our traditional views of the natural and the artificial. Parikka not only understands insects through the lens of media and mediation, he also unearths an insect logic at the heart of our contemporary fascination with networks, swarming, and intelligent agents. Such a project requires the ability to interweave cultural theory with a deep understanding of the sciences—something for which Parikka is well-suited. Most importantly, Insect Media reminds us of the non-human aspect of media, communication, intelligence. Insect Media is a book that is sure to create a buzz."

It was one of those projects really fun to write - even if raising a couple of eyebrows when trying to tell what it is about -- to write modern media history from the point of view of these tiny animals. Not only a book about swarms, or recent years of media theory and media design that borrow from animal studies and understanding of insect life - but a wider take on the intertwining of animals and technology in modernity. A parallel methodology of theory in combination with cultural history, or let's say "media archaeology".

Hence, I came up with a summarizing way to describe what I am doing, and something that ended up as the opening words for the whole book:

"First, a practical exercise. Pick up an entomology book; something such as Thomas Eisner’s For the Love of Insects from a couple of years back will do fine, or an older book from the nineteenth century, like John Lubbock’s On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects (1888) suits the purpose as well. However, do not read the book as a description of the biology of those tiny insects or solely as an excavation of the microcosmic worlds of entomology. Instead, if you approach it as media theory, it reveals a whole new world of sensations, perceptions, movements, stratagems, and patterns of organization that work much beyond the confines of the human world."

A big thanks to University of Minnesota Press, and Cary Wolfe, who accepted this to his Posthumanities-series...such an honour to be there, among so many fabulous academic writers.

Read like a cow

Oh we supposedly moderns, we actually think like insects and should read like cows: "...the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting--and so it will be some time before my writings are readable--you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a 'modern man': it is rumination..." (Nietzche, On the Genealogy of Modernity, Cambridge UP, 1994, 10).

We don't only dream of animals, but we are caught in a delirium in which we are only part of them. Flying like insects, reading like cows, thinking like bacteria, we do not really have capacities of our own. Human is a fiction invented by the animals, by the soil, by the non-organic as well.

"Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society"

Here is the blurb that University of Minnesota Press are going to use for the catalog for their Fall 2010 books...mine is coming out in the Posthumanities-series edited by Cary Wolfe.

Insect Media
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Jussi Parikka

Uncovering the insect logic that informs contemporary media technologies and the network society

Since the early nineteenth-century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed the use of insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization—swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence—have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an “insect theory of media,” one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien life-worlds of insects.

Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for understanding the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.

"Jussi Parikka challenges our traditional views of the natural and the artificial. Parikka not only understands insects through the lens of of media and mediation, he also unearths an insect logic at the heart of our contemporary fascination with networks, swarming, and intelligent agents. Insect Media is a book that is sure to create a buzz." - Eugene Thacker, author of After Life

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media Theory and History at Anglia Ruskin University and the Director of CoDE: the Cultures of the Digital Economy research institute. He is the author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses.

Theory/Media

(image from: James Rennie's Insect Architecture, 1869)

Media Ecologies: Extending Media Studies

I have been occupied trying to think through the notion of media ecologies in the wake of Matthew Fuller's great work of the same name. I am trying to work through ex-Mongrel members' Eco Media project and also referencing Garnet Hertz's Dead Media project where both projects extend media ecologies to media archaeological ideas. The idea is to say how especially Eco Media project's methodologies are practical transversal tools to bring media natural and media technological into proximity -- or well, actually saying that they were never apart. Working through the art projects and via Simondon, Guattari and others, at the moment these three themes sum up what I am trying to say (this is from the article's "conclusions" as it stands in the current draft version):

1)Expansion of “media” to include a number of such processes, objects and modes of perception, motility and relationality that are not usually seen as “media” in its modern, cultural sense; in this expanded mode, media becomes more an ethological relationality than merely a technological object. Hence, media ecologies can take its cue as much from flows and streams of nature or the modes of perception of animals.

2) Media ecologies engage in transversal communication that tie together the aforementioned “media of nature” to considerations of current media culture. Media ecologies can bring such dispersed practices into proximity through experimental takes, methods, field days, and such that engage for example in rethinking such human-centred notions of security and ownership that characterise contemporary media sphere. With the Eco Media project, this combined with an expansion of the notion of “free media.”

3) Media ecologies in our take act as imaginary media of sorts; but not media of imaginary things, but imagination as extension of the potentialities of media. Through the projects, we can get a glimpse on the idea of media history as a reservoir of R&D, as Garnet Hertz has labelled it in the wake of media archaeological research, which poses not only the demand to rethink temporality in a less linear sense but also the political-economic ties of media in the midst of current eco-crisis.

Needs work, but I love this opportunity to continue some of the Insect Media themes but without actually talking about insects per se. That was kind of the idea in that book, ; that insects acted as good vehicles towards thinking "relationality" and ethology of technological objects. The Eco Media project in itself is a wonderful, quirky project that also included the Eco Media open day; natural media olympics and the Pigeon vs. Internet race were among highlights! And of course, the fact that the pigeon won the race due to technical problems with the internet system...