Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 ed. by Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka (review)

Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 is a collection of essays that present the work of artist-engineer Kurenniemi as a locus for thinking about media art history. The book stems from the major presentation of Erkki Kurenniemi’s work at the dOCUMENTA 13 exhibition in Kassel in 2012. The interconnections between his work, now located at the Central Art Archive at the Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki, and the concept of the archive is just one strand through which the reader can engage with this book. The work of Kurenniemi does not fit neatly into one discipline or another; as the editors highlight, Kurenniemi was a pioneer of electronic music and computer arts as well as an experimental filmmaker, inventor, archivist and futurologist. For the editors of Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History, he is the encapsulation of the artist-engineer who elides the traditional academic and museological categories.

Editors Joasia Krysa and Jussi Parikka see Kurenniemi as illustrative of post–World War II art that straddles numerous disciplinary boundaries “from the aesthetic to the scientific and technical.” This book is aimed at those following the various paths of media archaeology, museology, computer arts and electronic music–curators, art historians and all those concerned with questions of how we store and retrieve knowledge.

The book is divided into six sections—“Archival Life,” “Visual Archive,” “Artistic Practice,” “Science/Technology,” “Music” and “Interviews”—and each section is introduced by a contributor. The “unwriting” in the title is a thread through which one can begin to unravel the work of Kurenniemi. The idea is taken from Kurenniemi’s thoughts in a letter where he envisions the possibility of “unwriting poetry,” a to and fro between the sciences and the arts to articulate through one practice, or algorithm, that which has been unpacked, understood and recast elsewhere, reformulated with a deft precision and conciseness. The book brings together many of the fragments of Kurenniemi’s work, including finished and unfinished projects, inventions and diary entries—with the goal of reframing media art history by developing a better understanding of the interconnectedness of art and technology.

Sections such as “Archival Life” present Kurenniemi’s “lifelogging,” the everyday documentation of his life presented across different media—photographs, video, film, audio recordings and writings (diaries). The section deals with both Kurenniemi’s own take on his archival practice, which began in the 1960s and had no distinct philosophy, and the practice of archiving itself. In the chapter “Fleshy Intensities,” Susanna Paasonen presents the idea that Kurenniemi can stave off the erasure of life, human existence and annihilation and simultaneously move toward eternal life and the reconstitution of himself through his archive in 2048; this, she sees, as his archival fever. The “Visual Archive” section presents pictures, articles and sketches from the Kurenniemi archive, offering an introduction to Kurenniemi’s work for those not familiar with its scope.

In the section “Artistic Practice,” Kurenniemi’s ideas on art and technology are developed through his own writings. Krysa points out that according to Kurenniemi’s interdisciplinary perspective, art is just one of many possible outputs for his work. Kurenniemi’s ideas are also explored in the work of the media art collective Constant. “Archiving the Databody: Human and Nonhuman Agency in the Documents of Erkki Kurenniemi” is perhaps the standout chapter in the book in presenting a tangible exploration of the notion of “unwriting.” Constant investigates the archive of Kurenniemi in the project Preliminary Work. The chapter looks at the efforts to align the idea of the archive with computational processes given the understanding that for Constant archives are collections of materials that are readable, writable and executable and thus subject to certain ethical standards. Other sections in the book explore scientific and technological shifts that are apparent in Kurenniemi’s work and in society, such as the shift...