Jussi Parikka > Quotes

“The aesthetic tactics and various ‘minor’ methods such as circuit bending, hardware tinkering and so forth are important links to a wider activist stance towards technical media.”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

“In other words, media critique is not only about saying things, it is about design and materiality – doing critique in an alternative fashion, against the grain, so to speak (see Lovink 2003: 11). Through such material existence, the media-archaeological work puts the spectator/user/viewer into a new relation with the imaginary, and hence forces us to engage creatively with the presence of media – new and old, imagined and real.”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

“In Zombie Media with Garnet Hertz we address the wider context and impact of the “dead media” devices refusing to disappear from planetary existence.[12] Building on Sterling’s work, we argue that there is a need to account for the undead nature of obsolete media technologies and devices in at least two ways: to be able to remember that media never dies, but remains as toxic waste residue, and also that we should be able to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply.”
― Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene

“In this spirit, one key methodological guideline would be: if you want to understand contemporary media technological culture, look at its science and military contexts, instead of the content of what is consumed as entertainment media.”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

“Steam punk is also a good symbol for the media-archaeological spirit of thinking the new and the old in parallel lines, and cultivating enthusiasm for media, technology and science through aesthetics, politics and other fields of critical inquiry.”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

“Archaeology here means digging into the background reasons why a certain object, statement, discourse or, for instance in our case, media apparatus or use habit is able to be born and be picked up and sustain itself in a cultural situation.”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?

“Archivist / Circuit Bender For the figure of the artist, technical media has meant nods both toward engineering and the archive, as Huhtamo has noted: “the role of the artist-engineer, which rose into prominence in the 1960s (although its two sides rarely met in one person), has at least partly been supplanted by that of the artist-archaeologist.”23 Yet methodologies of reuse, hardware hacking, and circuit bending are becoming increasingly central in this context as well. Bending or repurposing the archive of media history strongly relates to the pioneering works of artists such as Paul DeMarinis, Zoe Beloff, or Gebhard Sengmüller—where a variety of old media technologies have been modified and repurposed to create pseudo-historical objects from a speculative future.”
― Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media

“We need to ask ourselves: how do we keep such a transdisciplinary spirit of curiosity and intellectual radicality alive and updated in a situation in which university degrees are being reduced to only being ‘qualifications’ for particular jobs?”
― Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology?