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Between 1750-1753, Giambattista Tiepolo painted the world’s largest continuous ceiling fresco in Würzburg, Franconia, commissioned by Karl Phillip von Greiffenklau. This monumental artwork, spanning 600 square meters, depicts Apollo and the Four Continents. Paolo Patelli’s film project, The Countable Parts of the World, uses a 3D digital model of the fresco to explore historical and media contexts, presenting both as “unimages”. The film project shifts focus from visual to data representations, transforming the fresco’s organized composition into a dynamic globe, revealing new perspectives and distortions through data manipulation.

O texto a seguir é um trecho editado do livro de Jussi Parikka, Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). O livro retoma o conhecido conceito de “imagens operativas” de Harun Farocki e, ao se deslocar pela arte, pelo design, pela arquitetura e pelas culturas visuais, oferece um guia para a compreensão das práticas contemporâneas de imagens e dados, das artes visuais às operações invisíveis da Inteligência Artificial (IA) e da machine vision.

This article addresses handmade films and artist-run labs in particular as sites of hands-on film culture that reactivate moments and materials from media history. Drawing on existing research, discourses, and discussions with contemporary experimental filmmakers affiliated with labs or practicing their work in relation to film lab infrastructure, we focus on these sites of creation, preservation, and circulation of technical knowledge about analog film. But instead of reinforcing the binary of analog vs. digital, we argue that the various material practices from self-made apparatuses to photochemistry and film emulsions are ways of understanding the multiple materials and layered histories that define the post-digital culture of film. This focus links our discussion with some themes in media archaeology (experimental media archaeology as a practice) and to current discussions about labs as arts and humanities infrastructures for collective projects and practice-based methods.

This article approaches the technological city both from the perspective of sensors and as a conceptual thread that relates to air pollution. Smart cities carry forward their earlier technological legacy in infrastructure and often also in terms of the residual air pollution, like photochemical smog. The issue of the sensorial becomes a central focus of the article ranging from the experience of air pollution to its tracking and monitoring in remote sensing solutions. These two threads, sensors and the sensed city, lead to a conceptual argument that suggests to look at the technologies of smart city as an entanglement of the materiality and data.

Advogando-se de seu vasto conhecimento das "Media Arts", Jussi Parikka as utiliza para conceituar e explicar o que chama de arqueologia das mídias, corrente teórica de forte inspiração na teoria alemã das mídias. Com correntes diversas subsumidas no mesmo guarda-chuva teórico, o autor disseca, sempre pontuando com exemplos, as possibilidades teóricometodológicas possibilitadas pelo conceito, ampliando assim o arcabouço teórico da história dos meios de comunicação. Seu ponto central, com claro viés político, é que o fascínio pelo “novo” e pela “inovação” nas mídias e na tecnologia advoga uma história evolucionista de progresso que esconde as alternativas e, inclusive, as “mídias imaginárias”, e muito rapidamente se coloca a serviço do status quo defendido pelas grandes empresas de mídia e tecnologia. Mais rico, conclui, seria causar curtos-circuitos: nas tecnologias programadas com obsolescência, nas mídias descartáveis, na história dos meios, nos métodos e na teoria.

Entrevista com Jussi Parikka por Michael Dieter

In this article I will investigate the relations of media and ecology, arguing that the incorporation of nature and ecology as part of the media theoretical discourse should also be connected to the ecological contexts in which theory is being produced. This means a concretisation of media ecology in terms of its focus and topic to take into account the current eco-crisis, from perspectives related to animal studies, electronic waste, and even geology. In this sense, the argument of the text is simple: there is a concrete edge to media ecological theory, and in this instance it is elaborated through the themes of animals, waste, and mineral resources.

This article focuses on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab. The Eco Media project developed new modes of thinking media (ecology) through a tracking of the intensities of nature. However, in this case the medium is understood in a very broad sense to cover the ecosystem as a communication network of atmospheric flows, tides, reproductive hormones, scent markers, migrations or geological distributions. The project(s) do not focus solely on the ecological crisis that has been a topic of media representations for years, but they seem to engage with a more immanent level of media ecology in a manner that resembles Matthew Fuller’s call for ‘Art for Animals.’ Media is approached from the viewpoint of animal perceptions, motilities and energies (such as wind) that escape the frameworks of ‘human media.’ In this context the rhetorical question of the Ecomedia project concerning non-human media is intriguing: ‘Can “natural media” with its different agencies and sensorium help to rethink human media, revealing opportunities for action or areas of mutual interest?’ With the Dead Media Lab project, this article extends the discussion concerning media ecologies to media archaeology as well. Through such transversal connections, it investigates intensive transpositions not only in terms of nature/media, but also as temporal intertwinings of past, ‘dead’ media and the contemporary media sphere. Despite the focus on the old media of nature, such projects are emblematic of concerns that stem from a high-tech network culture. Ideas stemming from animal worlds and nature are increasingly used as tools to understand high tech culture, and they expand the notion of ‘medium’ to take into account non-human energies of intensive and topological kinds.

Aquest text s'ocupa de la materialitat de la pols, traçant una ruta transversal que va des dels processos d'encerat de les fundes d'iPad a les fàbriques xineses fins a un argument teòric més ampli que examina la materialitat dels mitjans, de les roques a les substàncies químiques. En poques paraules, aquest nou materialisme s'interessa per la diversitat de temps, durades, entrellaçaments i distribucions d'una àmplia gamma d'agències, algunes de les quals no humanes. Per això ens veiem obligats a reflexionar sobre els contextos del nou materialisme d'una manera nova, lleugerament més fluida que no pas simplement assumint que l'especificitat relativa a les bases tecnològiques i científiques de la cultura dels mitjans és automàticament material. En efecte, la materialitat no concerneix solament les màquines, ni tampoc afecta únicament els sòlids o les coses, ni tan sols els objectes. La materialitat es filtra en múltiples direccions, tal com demostren els residus electrònics o els efectes de la contaminació electromagnètica. És transformacional, ecològica i multiescalar.

Michel Foucault: Tiedon arkeologia. Suom. Tapani Kilpeläinen. Vastapaino, Tampere, 2005. 275 s.

Peter Burke: What is Cultural History. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2004. 152 s.

This article deals with articulations of digital accidents, focusing especially on how the computer virus has been signified as a problem for national security, international commerce and the individual user. However, at the same time as viruses have since the 1980s been constructed as malicious software threatening the very basics of the network society, they have been captured as part of the consumer capitalist system, exemplified e.g. in the rise of anti-virus industry. Thus, the article argues that capitalism itself is viral, functioning through a constant reshifting of its limits. Capitalism proceeds per se via these accidents and disruptions that it at the same time constructs as its enemies. In this sense, computer viruses and worms can be understood as the general accidents of digital capitalist culture.