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New Mythologies / Art

by Melissa Ray
September 29, 2016

About
In Conversation: Jussi
Parikka journeys through
 deep time to break open
Menu the myths of our machines Search

When the study of geology emerged as a science in

the 1800s, there was a manifold effect on the minds
of 19th century society. Once the material depths of
Earth were realised, so too developed a new
understanding of the depths of time. Out of the
biblical belief in the planet as a few thousand years
old evolved a picture of Earth as having been alive
without us for millions of years, a picture that was
framed by a widespread cultural fascination with the
ground and the underground. From science ction
tropes to the emergence of industrialism and
technological societies, early myths of a hollow earth
were debunked and the underground became a key
site of capitalist modernity. No site more so than the
industrial mine, which, as Lewis Mumford wrote about
in the 1930s, allowed humanity to at once journey
into natural history whilst being entirely reliant on
technology; as miners dug back into the deep times of
About the planet, they were enacting futuristic sites of
production harnessed through new, articial means.
 Today the extraction of valuable minerals and metals
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from the earth rages on. Seeking to interpret this
attachment to the underground in the context of new
and emerging media technologies is Media Theorist
and Professor in Technology & Aesthetics Jussi
Parikka. As the writer on Emma Charles 2016 lm
White Mountain, premiered online in POSTmatters
New Mythologies issue, he conjures the presence of
an omniscient, invisible narrator in order to dig down
into a man-made network of cybernetics. A poetic
narrative emerges as the lm reveals underground
ora and fauna nestled amongst rows of ashing
servers, described by Parikkas narrator as:
Hydrocarbon fantasies turned into a secret life of
data that is as buried as the fossils used to be.
Meanwhile in his short text The Anthrobscene, he
critiques the environmental destruction caused by
media technologies in the era of the Anthropocene.

From wires buried in the soil, data centres stored

underground and the energy of our information
pulsing through minerals, the material weight of the
About internet and technical media is swiftly being realised
by artists and academics alike. When we rst talk,
 Parikka tells me of one of his aims, to narrativise this
longer time attachment to the ground, the
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underground and deep times as a part of what we
now think of as supposedly new and emerging media
cultures. In returning a sense of deep time to our
understanding of media technologies through art
theory and practice, is it possible to effect real change
within the spiralling descent of environmental
destruction? It is at this intersection of past and future,
articial and biological, myth and science, and art
and theory that Parikka is reshaping how we think
about time and technology.

He does so most recently in his partly historically-

situated, partly theoretical arguments about the co-
determination of what we consider technology and
what we consider biology. Looking to regure our
understanding of how articial and natural relate to
one another, Parikka muses on the idea that, If we
are nature, so is technology, and thus nature itself is
technical. This idea occurs most prominently in a
trilogy of his texts on media-ecology, Insect Media, A
Geology of Media and Digital Contagions, where he
About
tackles the ecopolitics of technical culture to
understand the legacy of our digital lives on, and
 beneath, the earth. By understanding technical media

Menu in its material and cultural forms as a continuum withSearch

what we call nature, his work follows from Donna
Haraways seminal discussion of nature cultures to
propose that technologies are not only extensions of
Man.

If we are nature, so is
technology, and thus nature
itself is technical.

Rather than viewing nature as natural, he shares links

with Deleuzian philosophers by seeing nature as full
of dynamic processes in which human, nonhuman,
organic and nonorganic are all equal. This is not
something that comes out of the very recent fad of
object orientated philosophy, that is of thinking about

About the world from the point of nonhumans, he tells me

when we next catch up over Skype, but rather it is an
 attachment to new materialism, a project that emerged
from a range of inuences, including 1980s/1990s
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feminist theory. This radical idea is used to think about
how our cultural realities are completely embedded in
the material world that he reluctantly terms nature. It
is to think of new media cultures, or emerging media
cultures, as in fact a very archaic part of the planet;
Media that we think of as 200 or 2000 years old
becomes about 500 million years old by looking at
the earthly material that constitutes essential parts of
computational technology, he explains.

This narrative can be a challenge to adopt today,

when said earthly materials are being fetishised and
mystied to the point that users are alienated from and
naive to the functionality of the technology they rely
on. Parikka gives the example of a recent Apple
watch commercial in which advertisement of the
actual product is set aside for a quasi-artistic
fetishisation of the gold, platinum and alloy materials
that go into making it. In this case, inaccessibility is
embedded on the level of marketing, but furthermore,
embedded in the design behind the screen.
About Technology and design is seen as magic and this
replays itself as a rhetoric in the actual design of
 contemporary technologies, he explains. This
inaccessibility that characterises modern technology is
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a way of mystifying it and mythologising it. Thats the
reason why some open source activists and artists are
interested in how to break the surface, to allow access
to the functioning inside. But in the case of much
modern technology, if you break open your computer,
not much is to be found beyond microcircuits and
such. The breaking of the black box is actually a
technical and political question that then opens up the
wider agenda of whats inside, he continues.
Youre not going to nd a secret scroll that reveals a
big conspiracy about modern capitalism but there is
still massive value in the expertise that goes into
understanding the reproduction of social power, a
reproduction that functions through technological
engineering and design.

In lacking understanding about how our machines

function inside, are we lacking the ability to utilise
them for any necessary activism or political
intervention? As Parikka acknowledges, This whole
mythology is not only about the machine that sits on
About
your desk. Infrastructure is an extension of this. In
other words, our technical products are just one
 access point to these hidden structures of power. It is a
topic that many artists have addressed in relation to
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surveillance, but this lack of transparency is of equal
concern in regards to our own understanding and
awareness. Do you know where your electricity
comes from? Parikka asks, Do you know how it
actually works in terms of electricity trading? How
much of it is actually clean energy? All of these
questions are infrastructural questions that relate to
political power. What sort of infrastructural power
sustains the idea of technology as magical and as
inaccessible and then, where is it located? This is
ultimately what makes any symbolic or actual political
intervention so difcult, because power has become
so difcult to locate, and as Parikka notes, going
outside Apple headquarters and throwing tomatoes
doesnt really work.

In the wake of recent political events, it is more clear

than ever that, as Parikka explains it, technology
and communications are stunningly effective ways of
modifying, manipulating and trickstering the world of
things we see and things we dont. Modern media is
About
a system of myth-making in its most contemporary
form. But beyond the reality of media moguls and
 propaganda retelling national histories, the

Menu inaccessibility of media technologies has also steered

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our understanding of our own experiences. Today,
the real world is constituted increasingly by media
technologies as an environment in which we live. The
ways in which we see, from interfaces to physical
environments, he argues, are mediated through
contemporary tools and lters. Whether thats in terms
of audiovisual design and software, the satellite
mapped surface of the planet, or the visualised
undergrounds, it seems that the lens through which we
view the world has been embedded in us by the
technical media environment.

Technology and
communications are
stunningly effective ways of
modifying, manipulating and
About
trickstering the world of
things we see and things we
 dont.
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When we Skype Parikka is in Istanbul, in the midst of

moving back to Winchester, UK. Hes been back and
forth across the continent for the last two years,
working as both a Professor in Technological Culture
& Aesthetics in South East England and contributing to
the Istanbul Design Biennale, SALT and Transmediale
festival from Turkey. Through his engagement and
collaboration with arts festivals, installations, media
projects and various other methodologies, Parikka is
interested in the constant interchange between art
practice and critical theory. This is especially
important when considered in spatial terms, moving
freely across university, gallery and studio sites. A
recent joint project of his on the cultural phenomenon
of the Media Lab asks what it really means to practice
media studies. Its a project that reects much of
Parikkas methodology in its spotlight on how
narratives of the past can be veiled and distorted.
How do we get access to history by way of devices
About
that are seen in the lab? And furthermore, why does
this become signicant for the ways in which we
 understand digital culture?
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When I ask if he has any ideas about how any
signicant political intervention might work moving
forward, he is as fazed by the enormity of the
challenge as any of us. From Parikkas position as an
educator at Winchester School of Art, he believes in
the power of the institution, especially that of the
University. But it is how to think bigger that is the
challenge, when the problems that we face, such as
climate change (or climate disaster as he prefers to
call it), require massive infrastructural intervention on
a global scale. Instead of just symbolic
interventions, he wonders, how do you come up
with either concrete or speculative design sketches on
a planetary level? As someone who is hugely
cognisant about the current political, economic and
environmental dangers we face, there is temptation to
succumb to utterly gloomy, nihilistic tendencies.
However, he remains effectively driven by the
resistance to the apocalypse, which he disregards as
ever being a viable political solution. I do have belief

About in the world. As privileged people, we should not be

the ones who are thinking that were doomed. I cant
 grant myself to be completely nihilistic because that
would be too much of a privilege. Our theoretical
Menu apocalypse is really silly when looking at people's Search
conditions in context of the global south. Essential to
this widening of perspective is the impulse to look
beyond and beneath the surface of todays world.
Digging down to uncover the networks of power and
the stories that we weave, Parikka is insisting on our
effective attachment to political projects that will
protect the future of the planet.

Melissa Ray is editorialassistantat POSTmatter.

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