[LINK] "New APPS Interview: Jussi Parikka on his new book "Insect Media""

[rfmcdonald]

New APPS Blog's John Protevi has an interview up with Finnish media theorist Jussi Parikka, whose new book Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology takes a look at the ways in which insects have been used in popular culture to portray different non-human forms of intelligence.

Protevi: One of the striking concepts of your book is “insects as media.” How does that relate to this contemporary background in media theory?

Parikka: I wanted to reverse the idea of “media as insects” implicit in the “swarm” image into “insects as media.” So I traced how this particular brand of animals has been seen, since the formation of modern entomology in the 19th century, as a form of non-human intelligence and mode of perception – something very anti-McLuhan and foreign, but still very inspiring. I am thinking here how 19th century entomology and popular culture were enthusiastic about the ways in which insects inhabit the world differently – an alien form of being that does not move with two legs, does not think with the reflective brain but through a more instinctual enfolding with the milieu, and senses in a variety of different ways to that of the human. What David Cronenberg, or for that matter the film Microcosmos, have done in cinematic terms, I wanted to do as a slightly alternative cultural history and media theory.

Protevi: Who are some of the people whom you read in this respect?

Parikka: A good example is Roger Caillois, the French thinker close to the Surrealist movement. He was interested in a “New Science” that would move transversally across established disciplines. His famous writings on mimicry and the praying mantis gave huge inspiration not only to the artistic ideas interested in forms of perception and a space that is intensively devouring, but also such thinkers as Jacques Lacan. Whereas later writings of Caillois on typologies of game have been incorporated into game studies, I try to see how his thoughts on space, immersion, and psychic disorders (losing the sense of “I”) could be seen as foundational to new sensory realms. That is, I try to see what could be transported from his interest in insects to contemporary game spaces. We can use those ideas to make sense of the affect worlds, and affective capitalism, in which we are living in contemporary post-Fordist culture.

Protevi: This interchange of nature and technology is summed up in a second key concept of yours, “technics of nature,” isn’t it?

Parikka: Yes. Technics of nature refers to the way in which it is not only us humans who fabricate things, artifacts, to establish relations with the world; the whole of nature can be seen as such a dynamic process of relations, perceptions, durations, and cohabitation that is creative. Think of Darwin’s curious way of making sense of the dynamics inherent in nature, or the later architectural discourse at the turn of the 20th century, all that enthusiasm about how ingenious insects are in creating milieus of living. Or for that matter, take Bergson’s idea of “creative evolution.” These are the elements through which I try to argue that a media theory that starts with aesthetics – perception, sensation, memory, and the distributed nature of these processes in which the human is only one passing point – ought to look more not only at technical media, but at animals too. I just heard Mark Hansen [Literature Program, Duke] give a great talk at the Transmediale 2011 conference where he insisted that we need to turn to process-based media theory, instead of our focus on objects: this is however not only a theme we need to grasp through new ubiquitous media, but can find clues already much earlier – and in surprising contexts.