An insect theory of media to understand our media devices and our technological modernity.
Jussi Parikka (born 1976 in Anjalankoski, Finland) is a
media theorist, writer and Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the University of Turku, Finland.
Parikka has published widely on
digital culture, media theory and
visual culture. His work on media archaeology has gathered a lot of positive international attention and awards. Parikka's books include (
Koneoppi, in Finnish, on “cultural theory in the age of digital machines”) and his
Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses was published by Peter Lang (2007). Parikka's
Insect Media (2010) won the 2012 Anne Friedberg award for Innovative Scholarship (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). The third part of the media ecology trilogy,
A Geology of Media, came out in 2015 with University of Minnesota Press as well.
The co-edited collection
The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture was published by Hampton Press (2009), and
Media Archaeology came out with University of California Press ( 2011). The work on media archaeology was continued in Parikka's 2012 monograph
What is Media Archaeology? In 2013 he edited collection of
Wolfgang Ernst-writings,
Digital Memory and the Archive. Parikka also wrote the short booklet,
The Anthrobscene (2014).
Parikka's articles have been published in a range of leading journals including
Theory, Culture & Society,
Angelaki,
CTheory,
Leonardo,
Parallax,
Postmodern Culture,
Media History,
Game Studies and
Fibreculture, as well as in several Finnish journals and books. In addition to English and Finnish, his texts have been published in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Polish, traditional Chinese, Catalan, German, Greek and Indonesian.
Parikka is a frequent speaker at international universities as well as media, arts and critical theory festivals, and he has delivered invited talks at various universities including in Berlin, Melbourne, Toronto, California, Istanbul, Barcelona, London, Oslo, Amsterdam and Helsinki. Parikka has delivered keynotes at several events including Canadian Communication Association Annual Conference (2012).
