Video:

An Alternative Deep Time of the Media: a Geologically Tuned Media Ecology

This talk picks up on Siegfried Zielinski's notion of a deep time of the media -- not straightforwardly media archaeological, but an anarchaeological call for methodology of deep time research into technical means of hearing and seeing. In Zielinski's vision, which poetically borrows from Jay Gould's paleontological epistemology at least in its vision, the superficiality of media cultural temporality is exposed with antecedents, hidden ideas, false but inspiring paths of earlier experimenters from Empedocles to Athanius Kircher, Johann Wilhelm Ritter to Cesare Lombroso. As an alternative deep time, I suggest that instead of male heroes, we approach a more geologically tuned deep time - deep in various senses, down to mineral excavation, and picking up some themes of media ecological sort. The talk aims to introduce a more geologically oriented notion of depth of media that is interested in the mineral and raw material basis of technological development, as well as presents some media historical points of how one might adapt to a material perspective in terms of ecological temporality. Biography Dr. Jussi Parikka is media theorist, writer and Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art as well as Docent in Digital Culture Theory, University of Turku, Finland. He has published widely on the intertwinings of biology and technology in a cultural historical perspective. He is winner of the 2012 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship (Society for Cinema and Media Studies). Among his publications are: Digital Contagions (2007) and Insect Media (2010). In addition, he has recently published the monograph What is Media Archaeology (2012), as well as edited a range of publications on media theory. Parikka is online at jussiparikka.net .