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Media Archaeology Out of Nature - An Interview With Jussi Parikka

Jan 08, 2016

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Over the past several years, Finnish media theorist Jussi Parikka's work has received widespread attention in the academic and art worlds alike. Besides contributing to the international foundation for what has been called
German Media Theory with his work on media archaeology and his editing of Berlin-based media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, among others, Parikka has written on network politics, the dark sides of internet culture, and media ecology.
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  • Paul Feigelfeld

    MediaArchaeologyOut of Nature:An Interviewwith JussiParikka

    Over the past several years, Finnish mediatheorist Jussi Parikkas work has receivedwidespread attention in the academic and artworlds alike. Besides contributing to theinternational foundation for what has been calledGerman Media Theory with his work on mediaarchaeology and his editing of Berlin-basedmedia theorist Wolfgang Ernst, among others,Parikka has written on network politics, the darksides of internet culture, and media ecology.Together with Digital Contagions and InsectMedia, his most recent short book TheAnthrobscene and the forthcoming A Geology ofMedia constellate a body of work thattriangulates the world of planetary computationon many levels. From investigations of biologicalresonances in the design of media technologies viruses, swarms, insects to electronic waste,future fossils, and the significance of rare earthminerals, Parikka describes the complex layersthat constitute media knowledge productionunder the technological condition of theanthropocene with academic rigor and artisticelegance. Currently, he works as professor oftechnological culture and aesthetics atWinchester School of Art.In the following conversation, Parikka and Iaddress themes of insect media, the materialityof media culture, and other issues that relate tothe conjunction of aesthetics, politics, andtechnology. Paul FeigelfeldPaul Feigelfeld: You have constructed andanalyzed multiple media archaeological layersover the last decade: digital contagions andviruses, technological waste, insect and animalanalogies in media, and the geological,geopolitical, and climatic relevance of thepresent and future technological condition. Canyou tell me a little bit about the relations andfrictions that these layers have with each other?Jussi Parikka: Insect Media is a book aboutanimals, media theory, and how metaphors stemfrom material culture. The way in which insect-related notions such as swarms, distributedintelligence, hive minds, and computer graphicsformations such as boids, the artificial lifealgorithm, and US military robotics have beenforegrounded in digital culture discourse actuallyquestions the material history of this manner ofspeaking about technology.1 With this in mind, Ibecame more interested in the scientific framingof insects in relation to the idea of alienintelligence. A similar theme was picked up inpopular culture in the nineteenth century in theUS, as well as in later instances, such as thethought of the pre-WWII avant-garde, orcybernetics in the 1950s, which framed animalsas communication systems. Lets return to this

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  • This diagram depicts the "waggle dance" of the honeybee. The waggle dance is a figure-eight-shaped movement the honeybee uses to indicate the directionand distance of flowers to other honeybees.

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  • topic soon.Regarding the cybernetic of the 1950s, myprimary case study concerns the dancing beesfor which Karl von Frisch became famous: thewaggle dance is the specific embodied form ofcommunication that von Frisch claimed to havediscovered.2Gradually towards the end of thetwentiethcentury there has been a growinginterest within the arts in nonhuman perceptionand embodiment.This can be seen in the notionthat alien intelligence is irreducible to theintelligence contained in beings with two legs,arms, and eyes. Software and roboticsexperiments learned gradually that any systemthat is able to adjust and learn from itsenvironment is more effective than systemswhich you try to directly design as intelligent. Itsthe environment which is smart and teaches theartificial system. Such a realization stemmedfrom some streams of cybernetics, such asHerbert Simons research in the 1960s, whichaimed to show that an agent such as anant isonly as intelligent as its environment.These are some examples of insect mediaworking across the material force of conceptsand spanning technological and scientificpractices. For over 150 years, many fields fromthe sciences to the arts have understoodanimals as part of modern media technologicalculture and have suggested ways in whichanimals and nature can be understood asconduits of communication.My interest in viral culture not merelyviruses as objects, but contagion as a systematicfeature of digital network environments continued in another direction while studyingthis period that was so heavily influenced bycybernetics and information theory. I becameinterested in how the insectoid swarms,distributed intelligence, the hive mind finds itsodd home in post-Fordist digital culture. Its likenineteenth-century Victorian culture all overagain. Instead of insect motifs in womens hatfashion, digital rhetorics of insect intelligenceran through popular narratives.I admit that such claims about insects andmedia culture sound metaphoric and allcyberculturey, but this is only before one startsreading and realizing that the arguments workagainst simplistic determinations and towards amedia historical contextualization of how thebiological and the technological arecodetermining forces. Its sort of an extendedmateriality in which technology turns into itsother: nature, animals, the organic.From viruses to insects, early artificial liferesearch piggybacked on the scientific field,which mapped the mathematical and systematicqualities of animal worlds. Unlike some Americandreams of meat-meeting-tech, I, like Friedrich

    Kittler, have always been less interested in thehyperbolic dimensions of such cybermetaphors,and more in the historical links that reveal theproject of modernity as an extension of the waysin which power works through technology andknowledge. In other words, Im referring here tothe historical contexts in which knowledge aboutanimals and ecology gets turned into discursivestrategies for technological constructs. Themetaphoric carries a much wider scientificframework, but it does not explain it. Nor are thebiological metaphors reducible to linguisticdeterminations. This sort of historical workshould remind us not to naturalize technologicaldevelopment even if technologies are soembedded in the natural.PF: And how do we arrive at the point wherewe step back to look at geologies as media-before-media?JP: After viruses in Digital Contagions, andafter insects, I wanted to extend the excavationof the animal and ecological energies of mediaculture to the non-organic.3 This is where thenew books, The Anthrobscene and A Geology ofMedia, fit in as a continuation of themes wheremedia materiality extends outside media devices for example, the minerals of computertechnology that enable their existence asfunctioning technology in the first place.4I remember a discussion I had with StevenShaviro years ago, in which he actually suggestedthis to me before I realized how fitting it wouldbe. He was talking about Whiteheads ontology inwhich feeling happens also in the non-organicsphere, but it was one of the sparks that led tothinking about the media history of the earth. Itsthe adaptation of the intelligence of non-organiclife that determines so much of how accountsinspired by complexity theory have offered anew materialism of digital culture. But for me,its an ecological, even environmental reasoningthat drives this link. The resources that aresearched for, identified, and located bytechnological means in order to drive ourtechnological development consist of rare earthand other kinds of materials that aresimultaneously part of the earths durationalhistory and part of the new media culture. Theyembody a media history of the earth, and alsowhat will later become a sort of future fossillayer of technological waste. In other words,before and after media, we already have asignificant amount of material things that arepart and parcel of technological culture. Evendysfunctional technology merits its own place inthe history of media a history we are alsowriting in the future tense.If you want one concrete object toilluminate this idea, think of the monstrousCohen van Balen object H/AlCuTaAu (2014).

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  • The Hansen Writing Ball (this model dates from c. 1875) was an early version of the typewriter developed by Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1865.

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  • Mined from existing technological objects, its asort of reverse alchemy that brands the magicof technological culture in high-tech relation tothe earth. The gold, copper, aluminum, tantalum,and wheatstone that make up the structure arenot merely traces of technology. They alsorepresent the persistence of the elementalacross various transformations.5 Despite themerits of McLuhans proposal, then, media areless about extensions of man and more abouttransformations of the elements. Already RobertSmithson spoke of focusing on the elementalearth matter instead of technology as extensionsof Man.6 In terms of the medium, this connectionbrings our topic close to land art to Smithsonand the contemporary variations of earthwork inthe work of several artists. Among other people, Iwrite a lot about Martin Howses work, includinghis joint projects with Jonathan Kemp and RyanJordan. Similarly, thinking about artists fromTrevor Paglen to Jamie Allen and David Gauthier,Katie Paterson, and of course Garnet Hertz hasmade it easier for me to find an angle to addressthe geology of media because their work alreadyengages with such topics and offers an aestheticframework for these ontological questions aboutmedia.These questions are a natural extension ofthe material drive of our aesthetic and mediatheory. You know this better than I do: it is whatthe Anglosphere often identifies as Germanmedia theory, in reference to Kittler and otherthinkers who are interested in locating themateriality of cultural techniques intechnological arrangements. But I want to insistthat the materiality of media starts even beforewe talk about media: with the minerals, theenergy, the affordances or affects that specificmetallic arrangements enable forcommunication, transmission, conduction,projection, and so on. It is a geopolitical as wellas a material question, but one where the geos isirreducible to an object of human politicalintention.Besides, its good to avoid the obviousclaims and conclusions. Media theory wouldbecome boring if it were merely about the digitalor other preset determinations. There are toomany digital thought leaders already. We needdigital thought deserters, to poach an idea fromBlixa Bargeld. In an interview, the EinstrzendeNeubautenfrontman voiced his preference for adifferent military term than avant-garde for hisartistic activity: that of the deserter. Heidentifies not with the leader but rather with thepartisan, somebody in the woods who doessomething else and storms on the army at themoment they did not expect it.7 Evacuateyourself from the obvious, by conceptual orhistorical means. Refuse prefabricated

    discussions, determinations into analogue ordigital. Leave for the woods.But dont mistake that for a Luddite gesture.Instead, I remember the interview you did withErich Hrl, where he called for a neo-cyberneticunderground one that does not let itself bedictated by the meaning of the ecologic and oftechnology, neither by governments, nor byindustries.8Its a political call as much as anenvironmental-ecological one a call that refersback to multiple (Guattarian) ecologies: not justthe environment but the political, social,economic, psychic, social, and, indeed, mediaecologies.Its this sort of cascade of a thousand tinyecologies that I want to trigger with my work onviruses, insects, and also the non-organicgeology and geophysics of media.PF: In the current age of big data and swarmintelligence, technology looks increasingly tonature and the animal kingdom for inspiration.But you argue that this has been the case sincethe nineteenth century. Can you expand a littleon the history of this at first surprisingconnection?JP: Lets think of it like this. When you startto look at how we talk about our technologiesand also how they are designed, we areconfronted with various expressions aboutnature a fascination with nature, animals, andecology as processes from which we cansomehow learn. Despite promises of connectionand economy or a culture of human sharing,networked media technologies are alsodescribed in terms that make us sound likeinsect colonies: distributed intelligence, swarms,hive mind, and so forth.But as previously mentioned, thisfascination with the insect was already part of amuch earlier wave of enthusiasm for newtechnologies in the nineteenth century. This wasthe age of telegraphs, different audio-visualtechnologies, and a generalized expectation ofthe coming machine age built on the back of thefirst wave of industrialization. Constant parallelsbetween natures perfection and the rationalityof the machine already started to appear at thetime. On the one hand, there was the idea thatanimals such as insects, with their multiplecompound eyes, six legs, and wirelesscommunication across wide distances, are likean alien life-form that mediates the worlddifferently than earthbound creatures. You canfind this notion in surprising places, such asentomology books. On the other hand, afterDarwin but also continuing along with someearlier religious undertones, one finds thesimultaneously occurring idea that nature is aperfection engine: a force that is always lookingfor an optimal solution to a problem. In

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  • Women learn to type blindfolded at a secretarial course in the 1920s.

    architecture, this sort of relationship to the builtenvironment persisted in the bridging of thenatural and the artificial.Nature as a mathematician a problemsolver is an idea with earlier roots. It isconstantly referenced in descriptions of naturalprocesses in scientific and popular scienceliterature. For example, insect colonies are oftenportrayed as perfection machines, i.e., modelsthat have a lot to teach us about optimizationalgorithms.PF: But hasnt this turned out to be amisconception? Starting with early forays intothe science of ecology in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries think about people likeArthur Tansley this idea of nature as self-regulating, harmonious, and always being able tofind an equilibrium deeply ingrained itself intothe systems theories of cybernetics up throughThe Limits of Growth (1972), while more recentstudies have started to show that chaos,contingency, and change are much moresignificant and of course harder to simulate,predict, and deal with on all levels. Doesnt thischange the post-cybernetic approach to earth asmedia entirely?JP: It seems to depend on scale. Looking athow insect colonies optimize their movements

    feeds into probabilistic problem solving; it doesnot carry the weight of the illusions of aharmonious planet in homeostasis. Its on thelevel of technique that such naturalizations arestill seen as useful ways of processing data.But applying the idea of a self-regulatingsystem to the level of the planet is of courseanother thing altogether, and much moredifficult. As you point out, it has become clearthat we are dealing with such massive levels ofinterconnected patterns that it sets quite adifficult task for simulation techniques. Itseasier to simulate things when we know theagents and parameters involved. The morecomplex systems become, the more difficult it isto perceive and project the interactions,transactions, and intra-actions within.Computational power is one thing useful bothfor financial institutions as well as artificial liferesearch but so is the careful work of selectingwhat we focus on in any simulation of a naturalor economic process. Which variables are seenas important? What sort of agents are chosen asinteracting, and in what ways? Based on whatsort of data, collected where, and under whatconditions do we mobilize projectivecalculations? What are the logistics and framingof the data according to which we want to

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  • A flock of starlings swarm together in migration.

    David Cronenberg, The Fly (1986), film still.

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  • perceive the planet as simulated?Furthermore, some of the more navehypotheses of the self-regulating planet over thepast century have always implicitly imagined theplanet as something made for us: the underlyingbelief being that whatever we do to it, the planetwill restore a suitable balance for us humans. Ifthe planet is a self-regulating system, it does notnecessarily mean that the time-scale is at alladjusted for the human species Lynn Margulisalready reminded us that Gaia is a tough bitchwho works happily without any humans around.9And the fantasy of homeostasis has notreally disappeared from popular scientificdiscourse. It might have just shifted in order tobe effective in other contexts. The use offeedback loops in health and wellnessapplications is such a big thing within thequantified self movement a careful primingof the self that is however constitutive of a mix ofenvironmental relations captured through anever-increasing number of devices that enableus to perceive previously undiscovered patterns.Already in 1952, Ross Ashby introduced hisHomeostat Machine in the Macy conferences oncybernetics, and today we are still in the midst ofproducing and sometimes even fetishizing cultural techniques of optimization.10PF: Speaking of optimization, anotherrecurring reference point is of course the brain about which we still know very little. My favoriteoptimization procedure in AI and neural networksis called Optimal Brain Damage, which worksby strategically pruning connections in a networkin order to reduce redundancies.JP: The ideal of a perfectly optimizedbrain read: connected emergent transmissionnetwork of any kind is constantly fantasizedthrough its abilities to self-repair. The ideal braincan reroute around damaged areas. It learns.Flexibility and adaptation are the key words here,as shown in artificial life and AI research over thepast few decades. From the original idea ofintelligent machines, or representational AI, wehave now moved to a focus on learning machinesthat are able to adapt to their environment andbootstrap the environments cues as part of itsintelligence.On a slightly different but not unrelatedlevel, Catherine Malabou has been able to clearlyidentify the relationship between the brain andcontemporary capitalism.11 Pasi Vliaho alsopicks up this connection in his recent bookBiopolitical Screens, which highlights themilitary-scientific determinations of theneoliberal brain, which is presented as flexibleeven when prone to constant failure. Hence theimportance of pedagogical drills for example,the military recuperation programs that retraintraumatized soldiers.12

    I became interested in this constant back-and-forth movement between the natural andthe technological as a way of framing analternative approach to technology. I started tolook into how this theme of animality persists ina more ecological relation to technology. Ecologyhere does not necessarily mean nature, butmore accurately, the wider set of relations inwhich technology is understood as a historicaland material conditioning of everyday life.By examining insects, animals, and so on inthis media archaeology of the animal and thetechnological, I was able to locate some very oddand inspiring insights into media, art, andtechnology. That brain you mention we need toconstantly remind ourselves that its not a modelof the necessarily human brain. The brainbecomes a more general cybernetic model too.Its not merely the human that is modeled here.Design solutions are also picked up. Besidesresearch into bees and their embodied forms ofcommunication, think of, for example, Britishcybernetics and W. Grey Walters cyberneticturtles, or scientific research with monkeys anddolphins in the US,14 which was of interest to theUS Navy.It is not merely about insects of course;think, for example, of early robotics designed tobe embodied and self-reflective of theirsurroundings. In a way this meant bootstrappinga sort of tiny intelligence as part of the robotsworld-relations.PF: How does the study of swarms of birdsor fish, ant colonies, the analysis of oceancurrents, or the creation of artificial life-formshelp us create better models for collectiveagency and organization?JP: In British cybernetics, William GreyWalters work on a robotic tortoise in the 1950swas a good example of how to think, design, andplan in a non-anthropocentric way. In more waysthan one, a lot of the early work of contemporarysociety on smart agents that are responsive totheir environments was set in post-WWIIcybernetics; British and American scholars incybernetics and information theory are theforefathers of the contemporary posthumanswarm-world.Swarms are, of course, a key concept interms of the insect media approach. The focuson swarms is a curious move, from naturedocumentaries about fish flocks to computeranimation techniques that partially automateagent movements. One key feature of the recententhusiasm for using swarming to describeemergent forms of organization is that its nolonger necessary to design a central intelligence;instead, one can build reflective, interactive, anddeveloping systems that bootstrap intelligenceinto their behavior.

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  • In other words, the beauty of a bird flockthat seems to move with a mind of its own is theperfect visual conceptualization for an era thatthinks in terms of emergent systems. But letsnot be mistaken. This was already the case in theearly twentieth century, when certain pioneers inentomology described the powerful, almostmagical nature of this kind of organization. Somepopular fiction writers at that time were amazedat how insect colonies acted like an organismcomposed of multiple distributed agents. WilliamMorton Wheeler, for example, took a scientificapproach to self-organizing systems and themeta-intelligence exhibited by the colony,which was often perceived like a machine. Butthat sort of a machine did not resemble theclunky steam and mechanical tools thatcharacterized industrialization. Instead, Wheelerwas already thinking of models that havebecome more prevalent in our so-calledpostindustrial age of intelligent machines intelligent because they can adapt and learn.They are collective machines that synchronizeaccording to the group and also the environment.This also stands at the emergence ofimportant traits of computer graphics and visualculture. I would like to thank flocks, herds, andschools for existing: nature is the ultimatesource of inspiration for computer graphics andanimation,pronounced Craig Reynolds, a pioneerin artificial life and computer graphics. He saidthis in the mid-1980s to mark his invention ofboids, these little figures of procedural graphicsthat moved from experiments in collectivebehavior to Hollywood films and the wider visualaesthetics of digital culture. In network science,the likes of Eric Bonabeau spoke of the designinformation gathered from social insects,pointing out that things like errors are not merelya thing to get rid of, but an instrumental part ofthe self-organization of a system that is findingand mapping the best ways to explore anenvironment.16This is the insect lesson: the difficulty ofbuilding intelligent systems is replaced by theidea that you can instead focus on buildingenough small subsystems so that, by interactingwith each other, they are able to createintelligent systemic behavior on their own.Swarms then spread from technologicaldiscourse to describe many other things, andnow they are indeed at the core of how we thinkabout social behavior and even the economy;crowdsourcing is one such logic that relies on theexistence of a network; the hive mind is a relatedconceptualization. Many other similar themesoffer variations on how entomological themespenetrate our postindustrial capitalist society.We dont need to think of this as biomimesis, asimitating nature; its more of an embodied

    relation of gathering information about therelations that constitute specific informationaland embodied patterns, and using those asdesign principles.17

    Robotic insects are the smallest flying robots in theworld. The technology used to create them mimics themovements of the miniature muscles in a fly's wings.PF: In both technology and society, there isa constant back and forth between centralizationand hierarchization on one hand, anddistribution, decentralization, andnonhierarchization on the other. So how canmetaphors of the animal world especially whenwe think about networks be used to thinkabout connectivity in new ways?JP: All of this gets really interesting, andreally problematic, when we start talking aboutthe society of connectivity through conceptsrelated to nature. This is an old critique but stillvalid: using terms that are natural andnaturalizing to describe complex social andeconomic relations in capitalist society is aperfectly tuned ideological operation. Critics ofcapitalism, such as Benjamin, made this critiquein their own creative ways, by recognizing theback-and-forth movements of history andnature. This was part of the Frankfurt Schoolagenda.The same thing happens through historicalretrojections: look, for example, at the number ofstories that are written about the first selfie orancient social media when some newarchaeological discovery is made. Its perfectmaterial for a pseudomedia archaeologicalsearch for the roots of phenomena that aremedia-specific and part of the postindustrialmode of capitalist operation. In terms of natureand animals, the connection between artificiallife and capitalism is deeply embedded in muchmore than linguistic naturalization andmetaphors. One can even say that this sort ofdiscourse is the new version of Adam Smithsinvisible hand. In this case, that means an

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  • interest in the semi-autonomous operations ofsoftware agents for example, in financialtrading. Since the 1980s, banks and othercapitalist institutions have shown a growinginterest in artificial life research, something Itouched on in Digital Contagions.But there is more than ideology at workhere. The swarm is not merely a quirkymetaphor adopted from biological discourse.Increasingly, swarms form our infrastructure,and are intelligent agents that act as proxies forour social actions, desires, and moods. Theswarm is behind everything, from the banal tothe cruel, from the networked smart house to themilitary-technology complex. The swarm is aninfrastructural constitution of relations ofsensing, data processing, and feedbackstructures, and it increasingly constitutes whatwe as so-called humans are able to perceive.PF: How does all of this apply to the notionof the cloud? I am concerned that thismetaphor of the ephemeral and celestial, puffyand angelic, conceals in a rather smoke-and-mirrors way the massive campaign of datacentralization that it actually encompasses.JP: I am tempted to say that it is as simpleas this: the shop window is the cloud, and behindit is the brand the massive, planetary-levelpolitical economy of infrastructuralarrangements. Its in this sense that theSnowden leaks are as much about thewrongdoings of the NSA and the GCHQ as theyare about the software and hardware that allowdata to flow and be intercepted. Its not merelyabout the specific techniques developed forinterception, but about the whole arrangement inwhich data is stored, processed, and transmittedin ways that follow geopolitical preferences.One can also realize this through suchdiscussions as the smart city, which is a similaroperation and should be discussed in terms ofthe materiality of its infrastructure and thepolitical economy that puts it into motion. Ofcourse, this infrastructure might be partly cloud-determined; control structures for traffic,security, and shopping are processes not on thelevel of the street, but on the level the cloud. Inpractice, this can range from driverless cars topreemptive automated security decisions madebased on projective risk calculations. But assuggested above, instead of thinking of thissetup in terms of ideology, consider it in terms ofa desire that is infrastructural and that channelsour actions, perceptions, and potentials. This isthe model that Deleuze and Guattari propose,and it works well in this context too; sites ofstorage, archives, and processing power that areconnected to the sensors, interfaces, and soforth are where reality is being modulated. Weshould not get too stuck in a representational

    analysis of the terms, which of course might beinteresting too. Instead, we should be able totrack how desire is invested in infrastructure andmaterial assemblages, and how we canconceptualize it accordingly.PF: (When) will the engineer disappear andtechnology become evolutionary?JP: The most interesting media theory workof the past few decades such as Kittlers hastried to think through this question in terms ofself-writing. When machines are able to write,reproduce, and design themselves, they pick upon characteristics that are more than what isbeing engineered into them. In 1961, the Britishscience fiction author Arthur C. Clarke suggestedthat any sufficiently advanced technology isindistinguishable from magic. Sure, but perhapswe could now rephrase that to say that anysufficiently advanced technology isindistinguishable from nature, not merelybecause it is inspired by natural processes, butalso because it disappears into itssurroundings.19Its not merely about the complexity. WhatIm interested in is a different sort of a relation,one of material production. One can write anarchaeology and a cartography of mediatechnologies from the point of view of theirmaterials the gutta-percha used for insulation,the chemistry of visual media, the mineral basisof computationality. Lewis Mumford was amongthe first to hint at how to do that.20 He spoke ofthe paleotechnical era, which was dependententirely on the mining of coal, and the followingmodern technical eras that discovered modernand synthetic materials as well as new energyeconomies. These are the genealogical traits of amaterial history of media that begins with thematerial and its modes of organization ratherthan with the engineer.Following Manuel De Landas thoughtexperiment, the future robot (media) historianwont be interested in the engineer, for example,but rather in the processes of organization, self-organization, and emergence of materialcomponents.21 And, I would add, this robothistorian will be interested in the affordancesand logistical chains that ensure the availabilityof the material components that sustain what wethink of as media and technology. The robot willmost certainly have a more efficient system ofdealing with electronic waste, too.PF: So the engineer or designer becomesthe material of media JP: Lets turn it upside down, indeed. Theengineer does not breathe life into inert material.With their specific qualities and intensities, thematerials demand a specific type of specialist ora specific method to be born, so that they mightbe catalyzed into the machines we call media.

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  • The material invents the engineer.Media emerges with a relation to the earthand the planet, both through synchronizationwith natural processes perceived to be efficient such as swarms and through a systematicknowledge of what materials should be extractedto build such artificial machines; minerals, fossilfuels, and rare archaic elements dating backmillions of years sustain the fact that we havehigh-tech media.PF: There is something uncanny in theotherness of insects. We all know the sayingthat cockroaches and ants will long outlive usafter whatever kind of apocalypse might come.How can we approach this posthuman discourseand the idea of non-anthropomorphicintelligence?JP: This is the other pole of mediamateriality not the earth from which media iscomposed, but what will remain after thetechnological. It is also the other end of screenmateriality, as Sean Cubitt has long encouragedus to focus on: the hardware of the screens as aregime of aesthetics that falls under the themeof ecomedia. This is not an object ofecoaesthetics as a separate art work so muchas it is the conditioning of the connectionbetween the technological and its environmentalbaggage.I write about fossils and their imaginedfutures in the forthcoming book, A Geology ofMedia, by addressing the idea of futurelandscapes of waste that will be the syntheticremainders of our scientific-technologicalculture. I move the focus from syntheticintelligence to synthetic rubbish. But in terms ofthe posthuman, the question is complex. In arecent interview, Rosi Braidotti nailed it whenreferring to Katherine N. Hayles.22 Perhaps, sheargues, we should be less concerned with thequestion of non-anthropomorphism than withnon-anthropocentrism. Echoing Braidotti, somerecent philosophy seems to have finallydiscovered non-anthropocentrism as anecessary perspective. But the insistence onabandoning anthropomorphism is ratherdifficult. We cannot just adapt a position ofnowhere of imagined object worlds and aphenomenology or even an ontology of that sortof enterprise without having something to sayabout epistemology.This marks a departure from someproponents of speculative realism. I am not thatinterested in getting involved in the currentphilosophical discourse that seems a bitremoved from my concerns in materiality, art,technology, and historical conditions of issuesthat are quite pressing, not least the climatedisaster. I am interested in the longer roots of thekind of non-anthropocentric thinking that still

    attaches to a wide range of determinationsrelevant to media history and media archaeology.For me, the philosophical question of nonhumanintelligence is one that we can address throughmedia history: the various phases in whichcultural techniques shift from humans tomachines, and in which complex feedback loopsand informational patterns redefine notions ofintelligence. Alien intelligence also comes inmany forms and has arrived many times alreadyin the form of everything from bacteria totechnological constructions.PF: What, in your opinion, will be the (near)future of drones, (nano)bots, and cyborgs? Willall that remains be just posthuman wastelandsof nanotechnological life-forms that fuse withthe resilient insect populations of the futureearth?JP: As in the skies, so in the networks.Thats as biblical as I can get. But more seriously,the multiplication of distributed agentsconnected to the military and corporationsdefines the way in which security andentertainment media worlds create a swarmingnear-future scenario, often envisioned eitherthrough the military possibilities of massivelydistributed robotics from Grey Walters robotictortoise to the robotic bee swarms or as thefuture of the service economy.Swarms are really good at synchronizing, oras German media theorist Sebastian Vehlken hasconvincingly demonstrated, they are indeedsynchronization machines.23 They createcollective behavior from simple elements, butthey also have the ability to synchronize withtheir environment. This is where the flocks ofanchovies in the waves and birds in the airbecome useful for understanding the smartenvironment. So much of what we put into ourartificial distributed intelligence machines ispredicated on knowledge about nature gatheredfor the past one hundred years or so. The naturalis folded in as part of the social and thetechnological, including military securityapplications.Parts of Snowdens recent statements orleaks include mentions of the MonsterMindsoftware swarm, which is designed to detectcyber attacks against the US as well as engage inpreventive counterattacks. Its a struggle on theinfrastructural and logistical level thatcharacterizes these sort of situations where thetarget does not merely come in human form. Thisis one form of the swarm-service future, with thedistributed proxies of surveillance, sensors,and military operations offered as software orrobotics.PF: Which means that technologys level ofautonomy and autonomous nonhuman agency isrising. What if we thought about this not in terms

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  • of warfare, but in terms of ecological evolution?When swarms of networked nanobots migrateand flock to the Global South to mine rare earthminerals for themselves JP: Its still a continuation of the securityindustries that are part and parcel of theprotection of the resourcing, logistics, andaccumulation of materials. The variousmilitary/defense equipment manufacturers areconstantly looking for new markets, which alsomeans that domestic security in many countrieswill see an increase in drones as the proxies ofintelligent law enforcement. Drones are at theforefront of technological and legal battles overnew forms of enforcing borders that are notmerely national limits, but rather a variety ofprotected zones based on different securityconcerns, economic interests, and so on. Theyalso create new cultural practices andsubcultures such as those around DIY dronedesign.

    Developed in the 1970s, this micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) wasan insect-sized micro Air Vehicle made to look like a dragonfly and isnow on display at the CIA Museum in Langley, Virginia.

    Why would you have to invent apocalypticfuture scenarios when all you have to do is writea descriptive account of the current moment? Itwas Sean Cubitt again who nailed it: the hostilecyborg-entity thats out to get us is not sent fromthe future in the form of a killer robot, but ratherexists now as the distributed intelligence ofcorporations that feed on the natural resourcesof the planet and the living energies of humans.What are the institutional ties of drones also interms of their data relations? Where does thefeed go, whose drones are they, and how is datagathered with sensors institutionalized and setinto action?The legacy of 1990s cyberculture should notbe about idealizations of a new territory that iscompletely removed from nation-states.Remember the declaration of independence ofcyberspace? Well, the supposed secession ismore accurately a new layer of governance thatcuts across the borders and layers ofcorporations and supranational bodies. It

    constitutes a reproduction and variation of formsof power, privilege, and security that worksthrough producing knowledge, but also by meansof brute force. Benjamin Bratton is the leadinganalyst of the new nomos that divides the earthand the seas, the clouds and the underground.The new technologies of self-organization, suchas swarms, drones, smart infrastructures, and soon, are employed in relation to the widergeopolitical agencies of the military-cryptological industries, and the border securityof nation-states and privileged private spheres.The novels on singularity that I find to becrucial markers of the emergence of thecomputational, digital culture of the 1980s and1990s from Vernor Vinge to Ray Kurzweil, fromErkki Kurenniemi to the critical accounts ofCharles Stross are embedded in the corporatework of Google. Kurzweils day job in naturallanguage processing is still geared toward hisvision of 2029, when computers close the gapand reach humanoid capacities of being funny,getting the joke, being sexy, being loving,understanding human emotion.24 Its a perfectnarrative for Wired, but it misses the point: itsnot a given that humans get the joke, or are sexy,or loved. But this bootstrapping of the affectiveinto the systematic search-engine-turned-computational-infrastructure of what used to becognitive capitalism fuels this whole massiveoperation.Florian Cramer is right to suggest that thesesupposedly technohumanist (corporate)fantasies are actually dystopian includingKurzweils and Googles Singularity University,the Quantified Self movement, and sensor-controlled Smart Cities.25Hence the postdigitalshould not become a mourning ground for anapocalypse to come, but rather a more politicallyoriented historical analytics, programmatics, andethics an idea inspired by Braidotti. Thenanotechnical and such are not to be projectedas part of a future, but rather as an articulationof the technical media reality now, includingeverything from corporate cybogs to swarm-agency. Any conceptualizations of the post arenot in this sense futuristic, but in the best casecan produce a sense of the present as a temporalmulticiplity worthy of our times. Again, I amechoing Braidotti in a feminist ventriloquist style.

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  • Paul Feigelfeld is the academic coordinator of theDigital Cultures Research Lab at the Centre for DigitalCultures at Leuphana University Lneburg. He studiedCultural Studies and Computer Science at HumboldtUniversity in Berlin. Between 2004 and 2011, heworked for Friedrich Kittler and is one of the editors ofKittlers collected works. From 2010 to 2013, he was ateacher and researcher at Humboldts Institute forMedia Theories with Wolfgang Ernst. He is working onhis PhD thesis, titled The Great Loop Forward:Incompleteness and Media between China and theWest. His writing has appeared in 032c, Frieze, Textezur Kunst, PIN-UP, Modern Weekly China, and otherpublications.Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture &Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, Universityof Southampton. He is also Docent in Digital CultureTheory at the University of Turku, Finland, which isalso his alma mater. Parikka has written on mediaarchaeology, contemporary media arts, networkculture, and cultural theory. His books include DigitalContagions (2007), Insect Media (2010), which won theAnne Friedberg award for Innovative Scholarship, Whatis Media Archaeology? (2012), and the forthcoming AGeology of Media (2015). He has edited such books asThe Spam Book (2009, with Tony Sampson), MediaArchaeology (2011, with Erkki Huhtamo), and aforthcoming book on Erkki Kurenniemi, the Finnishmedia artist pioneer (2015, with Joasia Krysa).

    1See Craig Reynolds, Flocks,Herds, and Schools: ADistributed Behavioral Model,Computer Graphics vol. 21, no. 4(July 1987).

    2Karl von Frisch, The DancingBees: An Account of the Life andSenses of the Honey Bee, trans.Dora Ilse (London: Country BookClub, 1955).

    3Jussi Parikka, DigitalContagions: A Media Archaeologyof Computer Viruses (New York:Peter Lang, 2007).

    4Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2014); JussiParikka, A Geology of Media(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2015).

    5See the project page onlinehttp://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/h-alcutaau

    6Robert Smithson, ASedimentation of the Mind:Earth Projects (1968), in RobertSmithson: The CollectedWritings, ed. Jack Flam(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996), 101.

    7Susanne Geuze, I am not avant-garde; I am a deserter: aninterview with Blixa Brgeld,Volont Gnrale 4 (2014)http://www.volontegenerale.nl/interviews/i-am-not-avant-garde-i-am-a-deserter/

    8Erich Hrl and Paul Feigelfeld inconversationhttp://www.60pages.com/from-the-anthropocene-to-the-neo-cybernetic-underground-a-conversation-with-erich-horl-2/..Originally published in ModernWeekly.

    9Lynn Margulis in John Brockman,The Third Culture: Beyond theScientific Revolution (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1995). Theconversation can be foundonline athttp://edge.org/conversation/lynn-margulis1938-2011

    10See John Johnston, The Allure ofMachinic Life: Cybernetics,Artificial Life, and the New AI(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2008), 4047.

    11Catherine Malabou, What ShouldWe Do With Our Brain?, trans.Sebastian Rand (New York:Fordham University Press, 2009).

    12Pasi Vliaho, BiopoliticalScreens: Image, Power, and theNeoliberal Brain (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2014).

    13

    See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics,or Control and Communication inthe Animal and the Machine, 2nded. (New York & London: M.I.T.Press and John Wiley & Sons,1961).

    14See John Shiga, Of OtherNetworks: Closed World andGreen-World Networks in theWork of John C. Lilly, Amodern 2(2013)http://amodern.net/article/o f-other-networks/

    15Craig Reynolds, Flocks, Herds,and Schools:A DistributedBehavioral Model, ComputerGraphics vol. 21, no. 4 (July1987): 2534.

    16Derrick Story, SwarmIntelligence: An Interview withEric Bonabeau, openp2p.com,Feb. 21, 2003http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2003/02/21/bonabeau.html

    17A point made also by JohnJohnston, The Allure of MachinicLife, 52.

    18The phrase is the third of theoften-quoted Clarkes ThreeLaws. This one is introduced inthe later version of Clarkes storyHazards of Prophecy: TheFailure of Imagination (1973).

    19The science fiction author KarlSchroeder has also used thesame phrasing in the context ofthe problematics of (detecting)alien intelligence. See KarlSchroeder, The DeepeningParadox, November 2011http://www.kschroeder.com/weblog/the-deepening-paradox

    20Lewis Mumford, Technics andCivilization (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, [1934] 2010).

    21Manuel Delanda, War in the Ageof Intelligent Machines (NewYork: Swerve, 1991).

    22Rosi Braidotti and TimotheusVermeulen, Borrowed Energy,Frieze 165 (September 2014)http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/borrowed-energy/

    23Sebastian Vehlken,Zootechnologien. EineMediengeschichte derSwarmforschung (Zrich:Diaphanes, 2012).

    24Steven Levy, How Ray KurzweilWill Help Google Make theUltimate AI Brain, Wired, April25, 2013http://www.wired.com/2013/04/kurzweil-google-ai/. TheWinchester School of Art iscurrently part of a consortiumwith University of California SanDiego and Parsons School of

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  • Design where issues of artificialintelligence, syntheticintelligence, and remote sensingare addressed as part of ourcollective research work.

    25Florian Cramer, What is Post-Digital? APRJA 3.1. (2014)http://www.aprja.net/?p=1318

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