Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks - Visuals: Geoff Kim & Jaimy Quadekker - Directing and editing: Bozhan Chipev

MUTE ISSUE LAUNCH AND PARTY FRIDAY 16 NOVEMBER! - Viral Utopias November 16th – 7PM til 1AM @ Limehouse Town Hall, London, Uk

Viral Utopias November 16th – 7PM til 1AM @ Limehouse Town Hall, London

Panics, plagues, and politics. Countless times the death of politics, utopia and neoliberalism has been proclaimed... and just as many times the lumbering remains of our conceptual apparatuses dust themselves and trundle on again... mutating their movements in unfolding recombinatory patterns. 

Come join us to celebrate the release of several new publications exploring this overlap between the utopian and the viral, the networked and the not-worked: Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks by Tony Sampson; Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia by Angela Mitropoulos; Open Utopia by Thomas More & Stephen Duncombe; and the current issue of Mute Magazine, ‘Becoming Impersonal’ Vol.3 #3. 

DJS Agit Disco DJs http://www.metamute.org/shop/mute-books/agit-disco 

LIVE BANDS Traum - London-based chanson for lovers of neo-romantisch perverse pop http://soundcloud.com/traumatica/whatsmyjob Hungry Hearts - whisky filled gruff folk punk: http://www.myspace.com/thehungryhearts 

VENUE Limehouse Town Hall 646 Commercial Road London E14 7HA RSVP ESSENTIAL http://www.eventbrite.com/event/4688544563 

ABOUT THE PUBLICATIONS 
Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks - Tony Sampson http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/virality 
Contract & Contagion: From Biopolitics to Oikonomia - Angela Mitropoulos http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=482 
Open Utopia - Thomas More & Steve Duncombe http://theopenutopia.org/ Mute, ‘Becoming Impersonal’, Vol.3 #3 http://linkme2.net/sx

Pic: Rinat Voligamsi's Light (Painting, 2012)

Read more on Mute Mag website

Digital Contagions A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses - Jussi Parikka - Peter Lang Publishing, Uk, 2007

Digital Contagions is the first book to offer a comprehensive and critical analysis of the culture and history of the computer virus phenomenon. The book maps the anomalies of network culture from the angles of security concerns, the biopolitics of digital systems, and the aspirations for artificial life in software. The genealogy of network culture is approached from the standpoint of accidents that are endemic to the digital media ecology. Viruses, worms, and other software objects are not, then, seen merely from the perspective of anti-virus research or practical security concerns, but as cultural and historical expressions that traverse a non-linear field from fiction to technical media, from net art to politics of software. Jussi Parikka mobilizes an extensive array of source materials and intertwines them with an inventive new materialist cultural analysis. Digital Contagionsdraws from the cultural theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Friedrich Kittler, and Paul Virilio, among others, and offers novel insights into historical media analysis.

Jussi Parikka is Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). He is the author of Insect Media (2010) and co-editor of The Spam Book (2009) and Media Archaeology (2011). Parikka's homepage is http://www.jussiparikka.net.

«Inspired by the work of Paul Virilio, Friedrich Kittler, and Gilles Deleuze, this book chronicles the contemporary digital landscape through the menagerie of email worms and computer viruses that infect and define it. A self-described media archeologist, Jussi Parikka is both theoretically nuanced and technically detailed, a welcome relief coming on the heels of dotcom hysteria over digital hygiene. The result is a becoming-viral of today's technological culture. It is essential reading for anyone infected by the digital contagion.» 
(Alexander R. Galloway, Assistant Professor, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University; Author of 'Protocol and Gaming')
«'Digital Contagions' is the first book to look at the computer virus as a historical and cultural phenomenon, rather than simply as a technological issue. It brilliantly recounts the history of the emergence of such viruses in the context of other epidemics, and how these different kinds of contagions are ineluctably bound together in our technologized, digital culture. The book is an essential text for helping us come to terms with the massive changes this emerging culture is bringing about.» 
(Charlie Gere, Reader in New Media Research, Lancaster University; Author of 'Digital Culture' and 'Art, Time and Technology')

Read more on PLP website

Julio Varela - Vortex to Virus, Myth to Meme: The Literary Evolution of Nihilism and Chaos in Modernism and Postmodernism - VDM Verlag, 2009

The emergence of nihilism and chaos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries offers us a case study in how memes work. Memes are bundles of cultural information that display viral properties, sowing the seeds of reality in the individual minds that make up a culture, sub-culture, or counterculture. In the case of nihilism and chaos, the ongoing epistemological and ontological revolution initiated by the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the collapse of myth as a totalizing source of meaning, and the transition from a Newtonian, deterministic worldview to a quantum-relativistic, chaotic worldview transformed the Western cultural landscape, paving the way for the viral spread of nihilism and chaos to different intellectual and cultural strata. This book provides a framework for understanding how memes work in general and then explores the cultural spread of nihilism and chaos in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joyce's Ulysses, Beckett's trilogy, and Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow serve as focal points in this study because each work represents a critical juncture in the memetic evolution of nihilism and chaos during the modernist and postmodernist periods.


Julio Armando Varela was born in Miami, Florida. He received his Master of Arts degree in the Program in the Humanities at Florida State University in 1993 and received his Doctorate of Philosophy from the Program in the Humanities at Florida State University in 2004. He lives and teaches humanities and literature in Miami.

Language is a virus - Laurie Anderson