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Joseph Nechvatal
Mid-September 2007, Marrakech
http://www.nechvatal.net
from
http://transition.turbulence.org/blog/2007/09/28/review-of-digital-contagions/trackback/
Though no J. G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs, Jussi Parikka nevertheless sucks us into a fantastic black tour-de-force narrative of virulence and the cultural history of computer viruses (*), followed by innumerable inquisitive innuendoes
We may wish to recall here that for Deleuze and Guattari, media ecologies are machinic operations (the term machinic here refers to the production of consistencies between heterogeneous elements) based in particular
To begin this caliginous expedition, Digital Contagions plunges us into a haunting, shifting and dislocating array of source material that thrills. Parikka launches his degenerate seduction by drawing from, and intertwining in a non-linear fashion, the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (for whom my unending love is verging on obsession), Friedrich Kittler, Eugene Thacker, Tiziana Terranova, N. Katherine Hayles, Lynn Margulis, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Bruno Latour, Charlie Gere, Sherry Turkle, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Deborah Lupton, and Paul Virilio. These thinkers are then linked with ripe examples from prankster net art, stealth biopolitics, immunological incubations, the disassembly significance of noise, ribald sexual
Jussi Parikka
Jussi Parikka studied Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently Visiting Lecturer and Research Scholar in Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin. His Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, in the Digital Formations series (2007). In addition, two co-edited books are forthcoming: The Spam Book: On Viruses, Spam, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture and Media Archaeologies. Parikka's homepage is <http://users.utu.fi/juspar>.
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