Jussi Parikka
Jussi Parikka is a Finnish new media theorist and Reader in Media & Design at 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.
Parikka was awarded a Ph.D. in Cultural History from the University of Turku 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.
His work on insect media combines themes from media archaeology, posthumanism and animal studies to put forth a new history of how insects and technology frame critical, scientific and technological thought.
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.
- Links
