This Friday, 24 October, the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, The Hub and the Computer Arts Society will be welcoming media theorist Jussi Parikka to Birkbeck. The lecture takes place in the Keynes Library at 43 Gordon Square, starting at 6pm , and followed by a drinks reception.

The event is free but booking is essential via Eventbrite.

The event is special not just for its content, but as an inaugural event for The Hub at Birkbeck, our newly relaunched centre for media, culture and creative practice. On The Hub website you can find out more information on the event. The abstract for the lecture is pasted below.

Jussi Parikka: Media Fossils and the Outerspace Anthropocene: A Production of an Archaeological Future

The talk focuses on the growing amount of future ruins: the media technological waste we are producing as the underbelly of the contemporary fascination for the new. This production is also one of multiple temporalities, drawing on the materiality of the earth and engaging with a future that is radically changed by the presence of the humans. The talk engages with this topic through discussing fossils as well as some examples from contemporary art.

Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He is the author of various books, including Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and the forthcoming A Geology of Media (2015). A glimpse of the forthcoming work can be found already in the just published little e-book Anthrobscene (available from University of Minnesota Press in October 2014).