Jussi Parikka Read Bio Collapse
Jussi Parikka is professor of digital aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University as well as visiting professor at University of Southampton and FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts (Prague), where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture. He is author of several books including A Geology of Media, Insect Media, Digital Contagions, and What Is Media Archaeology? Recently he coauthored (with Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler) The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies and coedited (with Tomáš Dvořák) Photography Off the Scale. See jussiparikka.net.
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Coined by the renowned German filmmaker, artist, and writer Harun Farocki, the term “operational images” appeared in the early 2000s in his video installation trilogy Eye/Machine I-III (2001–3), which investigates autonomous weapon systems, machine vision in industrial and other applications, and the broader move from representations to the primacy of operations. Farocki’s film installation series presents this shift as a particular kind of image that emerges in those institutional practices, although it also articulates the shift through the various histories and spaces that condition both the emergence of such images and their industrial base: these include military test facilities, archives, laboratories, and factories.
In more than 60 texts, first published on-site at 56th Venice Biennale, artists and writers trace the negative collective that is the subject of contemporary life.
