Machinology

Could not be any more excited to finally be able to publicize this:

Insect Media has won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg book award 2012 — awarded annually for Innovative Scholarship! Winning a book prize feels fantastic, but of the possible prizes, exactly the one that carries her name;  remembering the inspiration her Window Shopping gave during my studies in the 1990s, and then later, The Virtual Window — all of her work pointing to the way we should be expanding media studies into new fields and investigations!

This sounds like an invented story but it is true: when I received the email about the happy news, I was indexing my forthcoming What is Media Archaeology?-book and only a couple of hours earlier had added the entry “Friedberg, Anne”…

The panel said this of my Insect Media:

“Combining philosophy, theory, history and archival research, Parikka presents, ‘forms of swarm culture in terms of new architectures to offer insights into networked media and the media environments we live in.’The book’s style and writing is energetic, cohesive and enlightening. Moving between early underwater films to cyber theory (biodigitality), the book is full of erudite reflections on Spinoza, algorithms, ticks, Umwelt, and contemporary culture.”

A huge thanks to all!

More about the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award:

“The Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award recognizes the best new scholarly work that exemplifies rigorous, interdisciplinary and theoretical inquiry into issues of vision and visuality. Funded by a generous gift from her estate, the Anne Friedberg Award recognizes innovative work that expands the discipline of film and media studies, emphasizing its relationship to other visual fields, including architecture, art history, and digital media. Believing that “how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame,” Friedberg was known for her intellectually agile examination of the increasingly visual nature of contemporary culture and its representation on a gamut of screens: at movie theaters, on televisions and computers, on iPhones, BlackBerrys and other hand-held devices. The author of two books on these subjects, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1994) and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), Anne Friedberg was President-Elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies before her untimely death in 2009.”