The contemporary arrives in various (dis)guises: the archival, the trace, the ruin, the various remains that have especially in fields such as media archaeology been seen as crucial conditions for the emergence of the now. The seemingly stable notion of "presence" hides a myriad of temporal forces. Vivian Sobchak makes the case this is a demonstration of the transhistorical operation in media studies; the remains of media culture where practices of “handling, measuring, collecting and focusing […] on historical remainders” (Sobchak 2011, 324) become a significant mapping of this sense of the contemporary. More specifically, this talk focuses on "remains" as a key term for media theory and how it expands into a discussion of material presence and infrastructural politics that spans much outside the usual focus on single devices as remains of "past" media and into issues of design politics.

^{Image: Rare Earthenware by Unknown Fields. The finished vases are made from the exact amount of toxic waste produced in the manufacture of 3 objects of technology- the smartphone, the laptop and the electric car battery cell. Film Still © Toby Smith/Unknown Fields.}

Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor at the Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and divides his time between Istanbul and UK. His work in media theory has received wide international attention, and his books have addressed a wide variety of topics relevant to a critical understanding of network culture, aesthetics and media archaeology of the digital. The books include the media ecology-trilogy Digital Contagions (2007), Insect Media (2010) and most recently, A Geology of Media (2015), which addresses the environmental waste load of technical media culture. In addition, Parikka has published such books as What is Media Archaeology (2012) and edited various books, most recently Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History (2015, with Joasia Krysa) on the Finnish media art pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi. His website/blog is at jussiparikka.net.

Organised by The Contemporary Condition research project at Aarhus University, and made possible by a grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research. contemporaneity.au.dk