Jussi Parikka

Jussi Ville Tuomas Parikka (born 1976 in Anjalankoski) is a Finnish new media theorist and Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark.

He is also (visiting) Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) as well as Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

In Finland, he is Docent of digital culture theory at the University of Turku.

In 1995, Parikka deferred his national service and spent 18 months as an assistant fisheries inspector in Oulu.

In 2021 Parikka was elected as member of The Academia Europaea in the Film, Media & Visual Studies section.

Parikka has published extensively on digital art, digital culture and cultural theory in Finnish and English in journals such as Ctheory, Theory, Culture & Society, Fibreculture, Media History, Postmodern Culture and Game Studies.

His texts have been translated into Hungarian, Czech, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Indonesian.

He has published five single authored books; in Finnish on media theory in the age of cybernetics (Koneoppi. Ihmisen, teknologian ja median kytkennät, (2004)) and in English, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), the award-winning Insect Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and A Geology of Media (2015).

Parikka was awarded a Ph.D. in Cultural History from the University of Turku in 2007.

He is a member of the Editorial Board for Fibreculture-journal and a member of the Leonardo Journal Digital Reviews Panel.

Until May 2011 Parikka was the Director of the Cultures of the Digital Economy (CoDE) research institute at Anglia Ruskin University and the founding Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre for Digital Culture.

With Ryan Bishop, he also founded the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research unit.

With Garnet Hertz, Parikka co-authored a paper entitled "Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method," which was nominated for the 2011 Transmediale Vilem Flusser media theory award.

It won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2012 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship.

He has also discussed this work in dialogue with historian Etienne Benson and media theorist Bernard Dionsius Geoghegan on the Cultural Technologies podcast.

Most recently, Parikka has written on media archaeology as a theory and methodology in various publications, including Media Archaeology (co-edited with Erkki Huhtamo) and What is Media Archaeology? With Joasia Krysa he edited a volume on the Finnish media art figure Erkki Kurenniemi in 2015.

Parikka is also part of the co-authored short book Remain (2019).

Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus phenomenon.

The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software.

The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology.

Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software.

His work on Insect Media combines themes from media archaeology, posthumanism and animal studies to put forth a new history of how insects and technology frame critical, scientific and technological thought.

Parikka leads the Operational Images and Visual Culture research project (2019-2023) at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague as well as the Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data project (2022-2024) at Aarhus University.

Dr. Parikka's research activities include continental philosophy, media theory, the politics and history of new media, media archaeology, new materialist cultural analysis and various other topics relating to anomalies, media and the body.