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Insect Media Jussi Parikka Insect Media Cary Wolfe, Series Editor 11 Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology Jussi Parikka 10 Cosmopolitics II Isabelle Stengers 9 Cosmopolitics I Isabelle Stengers 8 What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe 7 Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic John Protevi 6 Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times Nicole Shukin 5 Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics David Wills 4 Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy Roberto Esposito 3 When Species Meet Donna J. Haraway 2 The Poetics of DNA Judith Roof 1 The Parasite Michel Serres An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Insect Technics: Intensities of Animal Bodies,” in An [Un]Likely Alliance: Thinking Environment[s] with Deleuze/ Guattari, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 339–62; reprinted with permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Parts of chapter 2 were previously published in “Politics of Swarms: Translations between Entomology and Biopolitics,” Parallax 14, no. 3 (2008): 112–24; permission to reprint is granted by Taylor and Francis, Ltd. Chapter 7 is a revision of “Insects, Sex, and Biodigitality in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Teknolust,” Postmodern Culture 17, no. 2 (January 2007). Copyright 2010 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parikka, Jussi, 1976– Insect media : an archaeology of animals and technology / Jussi Parikka. p. cm. — (Posthumanities ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8166-6739-0 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-6740-6 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Swarm intelligence. 2. Insects—Behavior—mathematical models. 3. Bionics. I. Title. Q337.3.P36 2010 595.709—dc22 2010035074 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer. 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Insects in the Age of Technology ix 1 NINETEENTH- CENTURY INSECT TECHNICS 1 The Uncanny Affects of Insects 2 GENESIS OF FORM 27 Insect Architecture and Swarms 3 TECHNICS OF NATURE AND TEMPORALITY 57 Uexküll’s Ethology 4 METAMORPHOSIS, INTENSITY, AND DEVOURING SPACE 85 Elements for an Insect Game Theory Intermezzo 113 5 ANIMAL ENSEMBLES, ROBOTIC AFFECTS 121 Bees, Milieus, and Individuation 6 BIOMORPHS AND BOIDS 145 Swarming Algorithms 7 SEXUAL SELECTION IN THE BIODIGITAL 169 Teknolust and the Weird Life of SRAs EPILOGUE Insect Media as an Art of Transmutation 195 Notes 207 Index 271 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Even if I do not particularly enjoy insects, working with this book was a joy. I had already had the chance to work with the underbelly of media theory with my earlier virus-related project and my more recent book on “spam cultures,” but Insect Media gave me the opportunity to elaborate and continue theoretical and media archaeological ideas that were giv- ing glimpses of their insectoid faces. Nothing is possible without creative surroundings and a network of people with both intelligence and instinct who generously offer advice and support. Institutionally, this book started while I was finishing my Ph.D. thesis for the Department of Cultural History at the University of Turku in Finland, and my background in the department is still very much visible in this book. I have an obsession to “historicize,” although I never felt like being a proper historian. I thank warmly many former colleagues and the excellent e-library collections that allowed me to find quirky sources from the nineteenth century (and earlier) and that supported me in my academic perversions. Via the Department of Media Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, I moved to Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, where innovative colleagues ensured a good working atmosphere while I adjusted to the peculiarities of the British higher education system. A warm thank you to all of you who made me feel welcome and offered support with this project. vii viii Acknowledgments While Anglia Ruskin’s Department of English, Communication, Film, and Media was my primary everyday context, through a range of other people and institutions I was able to obtain important feedback and tips that (in)formed my budding ideas into a book. In no particular order, I thank Milla Tiainen, Pasi Väliaho, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Ilona Hongisto, Teemu Taira, Olli Pyyhtinen, Matthew Fuller, Michael Goddard, Joss Hands, Sean Campbell, Eric Kluitenberg, Charlie Gere, Seb Franklin, Thomas Elsaesser, Jukka Sihvonen, Trond Lundemo, Juri Nummelin, Erkki Huhtamo, Alan Winfield, Craig Reynolds, Steven Shaviro, Tony D. Sampson, Floris Paalman, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Garnet Hertz, Gary Genosko, Tina Kendall, Tanya Horeck, and Sarah Barrow. I hope I did not forget too many; as always, there is a swarm. Without the supportive feedback of Douglas Armato at the University of Minnesota Press and Cary Wolfe’s supportive and perceptive role as the series editor for Posthumanities, I would have been lost. Thanks also to Danielle Kasprzak for responding to my endless questions so promptly. I also thank the anonymous referees for critical but affirmative and encouraging comments. Financially, I thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation for a six-month research grant during the early phases of research. A special and warm thank you goes as always to Milla: we hate insects and spiders together but love things material, not least cultural theory. INTRODUCTION Insects in the Age of Technology ...cultural and technical phenomena providing a fertile soil, a good soup, for the development of insects, bacteria, germs, or even particles. The industrial age defined as the age of insects. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus There is an entire genealogy to be written from the point of view of the challenge posed by insect coordination, by “swarm intelligence.” Again and again, poetic, philosophical, and biological studies ask the same question: how does this “intelligent,” global organization emerge from a myriad of local, “dumb” interactions? — Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit FROM CYBORGS TO INSECTS First, a practical exercise. Pick up an entomology book; something such as Thomas Eisner’sFor the Love of Insects from a couple of years back will do fine, or an older book from the nineteenth century, like John Lubbock’s On the Senses, Instincts, and Intelligence of Animals with Special Reference to Insects (1888) suits the purpose as well. However, do not read the book as a description of the biology of those tiny insects or solely as an excavation of the microcosmic worlds of entomology. Instead, if you approach it as media theory, it reveals a whole new world of sensations, perceptions, movements, stratagems, and patterns of organization that work much beyond the confines of the human world. Of course, in a way this has already been done. Some years ago the ix x Introduction American research agency DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), in the past responsible for various high-tech army gadgets, revealed information about its aspirations to fabricate cyborg insects. DARPA was criticized and ridiculed quite soon because of this imaginative, to say the least, plan of harnessing these simple forms of life as part of the most developed military machine the world has ever seen. The idea was to insert electronic devices into insect pupae. The so- called MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) system was designed to smoothen as part of the body structure of the animal during later metamorphoses. The cyborg insect could be then controlled and used as a spy tool for army covert operations. Who would suspect a lone moth or a bumblebee?1 The connection between insects and high-tech war was not altogether new. Some years earlier, in the midst of fears of terrorists and cyber- hackers, swarms were identified as future models of conflict: “from ants and bees and wolf packs, to ancient Parthians and medieval Mongols.”2 Insect organization was creeping into the most high-tech area of the con- temporary world, the U.S. military, which was making use of ideas of nonlinearity, small tactical units, and network-oriented models of action. Not only the military was picking up entomology books; insects were being discussed in various other fields of media, communication, and digital design and theory as well. In visual systems, insects’ compound eyes represented a powerful example of biologically inspired computa- tion. Biomimetics was opening up a new field in engineering naturelike behavior such as locomotion, navigation, and vision.3 Insects’ wide field of view was attracting a great deal of research interest from players de- veloping medical, industrial, and military applications.4 Artists such as Garnet Hertz (designer of a cockroach-controlled robot), Toshio Iwai (“Music Insects”), and Mira Calix (a composer working with insect sounds) were engaging with similar questions as well, using insects to think through high-tech creation. Experimental video works such as the bizarre narrative of David Blair’s online film Wax, or The Discovery of Television among the Bees (1991) ties together military development, insects, and high-tech telecommunications media.5 Suddenly the cyborg as imagined since the 1980s in theory and fic- tion seemed quite old-fashioned. This shift was not altogether dismiss- ing the human being and its perceptive and cognitive capabilities: the Introduction xi two-handed and -legged brainy animal was seen to demonstrate distinct powers in visual (recognizing edges, seeing contrasts, differentiating be- tween dimensional entities) and tactile (the hand) faculties.
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