Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology is a collection whose raison d=être is found in the "nonhuman": the animal world in general, especially entomological worlds marked by multiplicity and metamorphosis, as well as "media technologies of modernity that are defined by wavelengths, speeds, and slowness that are beyond the world of the unwired human being" (203).It is a complex and multifaceted study informed by media theory, posthumanism, animal studies, and techno-cultural research and application, diverse disciplines that converge into what Parikka calls "insect media," a "transversal" field that moves from 19th-century thinking about animals (particularly the growth of entomology) into 20th-and 21 stcentury considerations of swarms, network culture, and the "transmutation of bodies and their sensoriums," including new "diagrams of tapping into and capturing such bodies in technocapitalist projects" (205-06).Insect Media maps this "transversality" in seven chapters carefully organized into two sections.Section One -"Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics: The Uncanny Affects of Insects"; "Genesis of Form: Insect Architecture and Swarms"; "Technics of Nature and Temporality: Uexküll's Ethology"; "Metamorphosis, Intensity, and Devouring Space: Elements for an Insect Game Theory" -addresses themes encompassing "scientific research and biology to science fiction, the physiology of movement and perception, avant-garde aesthetics, and the non-Cartesian philosophy of the early twentieth century" (xxx).Section Two -"Animal Ensembles, Robotic Affects: Bees, Milieus, and Individuation"; "Biomorphs and Boids: Swarming Algorithms"; "Sexual Selection in the Biodigital: Teknolust and the Weird Life of SRAs" -is largely situated post-WWII and articulates such technological environs as cybernetic loops and perception qualities that link machines and animals, as well as the inspirations of swarm behavior upon the development of semi-intelligent systems.Included in Parikka's nonhuman studies are forays into art and popular culture before Insect Media concludes with a lengthy analysis of Lynn Hershman- Lesson's Teknolust (2002), a film about self-replicating automatons (SRA) that is "a peculiar intervention into the practices and representations of biodigitality as it has been discussed since the 1990s" (171).The two sections are separated by an intermezzo and bracketed by both a prologue and an epilogue that are extremely effective in encapsulating the main arguments Parikka advances in this deft study of "insect media."
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".