Wed. April 10th 2017 at 7:00pm
FAMU, Smetanovo náb. 2
Room U1, 1. floor
(lecture will be simultaneously translated into English)
A lab after another, the landscape of creative contemporary industry and academia seems to be a hyperbolic imitation of the science-model: an experimental set up of specialised spaces of making; in the case of media and humanities labs, less making science but making things. This trend that penetrates Digital Humanities, design and media fields is one where the emergence of labs in the humanities needs however to be read against some historical considerations as well as critical evaluations.
This talk will discuss the laboratory fever: the fever that penetrates the changing university landscape as much as it has forced a rethinking of some particular details concerning humanities too. It is perhaps a maker turn for some, but it is also something that seems to characterise a wider interest in the idea of a laboratory as a specialised space of expertise. What are those sites that have since the 1980s been branded as places of invention of future (like the MIT Media Lab had it) but might also be fruitfully places of inventions of the past (media archaeology labs) as well as places of invention of other realities – like some critical and speculative design labs? What makes the lab so desirable?
Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and Docent at University of Turku. His various books have addressed a wide range of topics relevant to a critical understanding of network culture, aesthetics and media archaeology of contemporary technologies. The books include the media ecology-trilogyDigital Contagions (2007, 2nd. ed 2016), the award-winning Insect Media (2010) and most recently, A Geology of Media (2015), which addresses the environmental contexts of technical media culture. In addition, Parikka has published such books asWhat is Media Archaeology (2012) and edited various books, recently Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (2015, with Joasia Krysa) on the Finnish media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. He is also the co-editor ofAcross and Beyond: – A transmediale Reader on Post-digital Practices, Concepts, and Institutions (Sternberg Press, 2016, co-edited with Ryan Bishop, Kristoffer Gansing and Elvia Wilk).Parikka’s website/blog is athttp://jussiparikka.net and you can find him on Twitter as @juspar.