Media Moleculars of Smog Culture: An Alternative Aesthetic

Speaking of molecules, photochemical smog that covers so much of our surroundings especially in dense urban areas consists of Nitrogen Oxide (NO), Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), Ozone (O3) and Volatile organic compounds (RH).

A matter of concern for inhabitants and of course biochemists, it however is an issue we can funnily enough address also in our context of aesthetics, imagining and visual culture. This talk proposes to address smog – and more widely environmental issues from pollution to issues of geophysics – as relevant parts of our visual culture, proposing another sort of an angle to the “molecular”. Indeed, the constituent definition of molecular that one inherits from Deleuze and Guattari sets in relation to the ontology of perception. This molecular becomes more than a chemical description but a way to address the dynamic constitution of the (molar) individual. As Tom Conley explains, this is a sort of a “chemical animism” speaking of the elemental molecular conditions that constitute systems of “complex interactions”.

The molecular is an ontological angle that for Deleuze presents a world of “tiny perceptions” which are not only small in size but qualitatively present a different view to the whole. Hence emerges the whole agenda of micropolitics of perception and what could be called a chemistry of individuation. However, in the context of this talk, I won’t go into a discussion of Deleuze so much as hint towards speculative ideas of a media history of smog, environmental pollution and the technologies of tele-sensing /smog sensors as constituting a different sort of a visual culture of “new media” of mixed temporalities: the ancient rays of sun, the modern fumes of the city, and the emerging technologies of tele-sensing. I argue that such topics bring an additional angle to the already important extension of aesthetics in the realms of biotechnologies, the molecular vision, and the new diffentiating scales at which perception is constituted. Perhaps it’s the smog screens, reacting with sun light, that execute the truly ancient new media environment of post WWII culture as a sort of a non-human staging of the environmental catastrophy as well as an art historical period outside the usual categorisations.

Jussi Parikka is media theorist, writer and Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Parikka has a PhD in Cultural History from the University of Turku, Finland and in addition, he is Docent of Digital Culture Theory at the same University. Parikka is also a Senior Fellow at the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media.

Parikka’s books include Koneoppi, (2004, in Finnish) and  Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses is published by Peter Lang, New York, Digital Formations-series (2007). The recently published  Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010) won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2012 Anne Friedberg Prize for Innovative Scholarship. The co-edited collection The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture is published by Hampton Press (2009), and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications came out with University of California Press (2011). In addition, the edited collection Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste is out in the recent Living Books About Life-project (Open Humanities Press, 2011). His most recent monograph is What is Media Archaeology? (Polity, 2012), and he also edited a collection of Wolfgang Ernst’s writings for University of Minnesota Press: Digital Memory and the Archive (2013).

Parikka is a frequent speaker in international universities as well as media, arts and critical theory festivals, and he has delivered invited talks at various universities around the world. He blogs at http://jussiparikka.net.