Insect-Canaries

This talk will end with an emphasis on the invisible, but starts with disappearance. The talk addresses the intertwining of a certain discourse of technology with animals, and frames it as an intertwining of aesthetics and the ecocrisis. It addresses current ecological debates as a matter of aesthetics in the very fundamental sense of perception and epistemology, and links it with mediatic contexts. Under the term of “medianatures” – the natureculture-continuum we recognize from Donna Haraway’s theory  but extended into a media studies and arts perspective– I will discuss a variety of examples from Ernst Jünger’s novel The Glass Bees (1957) to contemporary artists such as Lenore Malen’s video works.

Dr. Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is also Adjunct Professor in Digital Culture Theory at University of Turku, Finland. His books include Koneoppi (2004, in Finnish), Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), and the co-edited volumes The Spam Book: On Porn, Viruses and Other Anomalous Objects from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and Media Archaeology (2011).  In addition, his co-edited special issue of Fibreculture journal on Unnatural Ecologies came out recently. He has just finished a new book on the theory and methodology of media archaeology (Media Archaeology and Digital Culture) for Polity Press (forthcoming 2012). http://jussiparikka.net