Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

This talk riffs off from Donna Haraway’s influential concept of naturecultures which established one framework to think about the topological continuity from nature to culture. As such, it was an important spark for the discourse on “new materialism” in cultural studies, a form of rethinking materiality in new ways outside a Marxist or a representational framework. Naturecultures – also resonating with a range of positions such as Latour’s – is a way to think through the multiple materialities we encounter in terms of contemporary technological society.

The talk extends naturecultures into a more medium-specific direction with the concept of medianatures. By discussing media materialism and its relation to “new materialist” debates as well as “medium-specificity”, the talk addresses ways to think through the technical and scientific specificity of contemporary media – beyond meaning, representation and the human body, the fact that technical media engage in such processes, speeds, and phenomena that escape the phenomenological human register per se.

Yet, the talk points towards a different kind of reading of media materiality than often found in “media materialist” accounts. We can question the notion of specificity and argue that there are various specificities from which we can draw upon. While German media theory (acknowledging that the term is in itself not very apt) has been insisting on drawing on materialities that can be directly connected to the important scientific contexts of technical media, we can think through a milieu theory of media: how media establish but also draw on nature, animals and other non-human intensities, forces and potentialities. Instead of thinking nature here in terms of the metaphorics it has offered for a long time for media cultural phenomena, and avoiding proposing any form of purity of nature, I want to look at the continuums of not only naturecultures, but medianatures that is slightly different from the emphasis of media cultures as the “new” environment for us human beings. Instead we approach medianatures as affordances, as intensities, as regimes of affects and relations and as processes of mediatic nature that offer a non-human view to new materialist media theory. Hence, we end up talking about waste and nature.

Bio

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 is just out: http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/. He is currently writing a new book on the theory and methodology of media archaeology (Media Archaeology and Digital Culture) for Polity Press (forthcoming 2012). http://jussiparikka.net.

Videomitschnitt

http://youtu.be/XwpHhkXnWeA