Parasites live and feed on other plants and animals. Techno-parasites use
whatever technical systems or apparatuses they can find as hosts, drawing
on their output, their energy supplies and cycles to procreate and grow. A
techno-parasite can be a simple or a complex system which is attentive and
playfully adapts to its host's structure. Its inventive struggle for
survival often causes technical disruptions. Techno-Parasites suck other
machines empty, disrupt their circuits, effect power cuts, disable them,
destroy them.

Erik Hobijn developed the concept of the techno-parasites as a reaction to
the lack of attention paid to the small elements of our technical
environments. The virtual invisibility, for instance, of nuts and bolts, of
human-machine interfaces or of computer software means that we are caught
unaware when the technology is disfunctional or disrupted. The hysteria
around computer viruses is a case in point. The techno-parasites are
machinic devices which radicalise this situation and reinforce the hardware
crisis.

Electronic and media art often suffers from a straight, functionalist,
affirmative character. 'Playfulness' is too easily read within the logics
of computer games. Zielinski has recently listed the phenomena, phantoms
and modi which he misses on the net, and which he claims artists have an
obligation to realise. Among the items on this list are: ambiguity, anger,
attack, collapse, crime, cruelty, danger, …, and, at the end of the
alphabet: passion, pathology, risk, scream, seduction, uneasiness,
yearning. The Techno-Parasites play on these registers, they are means of
disruption and transgression, they fill the machines with a life of their
own and act out of a beautiful and perverse independence. They are joyfully
dangerous and generally amoral.

The effective techno-parasite irritates humans for two main reasons. It is
a machine which, once constructed and liberated, acts at whim and is out of
human control. As far as the machines are concerned, it is alive. Secondly,
the techno-parasite feeds on vital and symbollically charged resourcs of
our modern existence: light sources, electrical currents, data flows,
communication lines. In so far as these resources are already deeply
inscribed in our unconscious, the techno-parasite attacks the symbolical
infrastructure of contemporary culture.

The techno-parasites are vicious little artificial animals that disrupt our
supposedly smooth, technological environment by highlighting the
'thingness' of the machines we use, and by forcing us to pay attention to
the marginal, the invisible, and the details which we tend to ignore. There
are many more hosts and resources for similar designs. As concerned
environmental techno-activists we should support the evolution, the
diversification and the procreation of these little creatures.