1 Tony D. Sampson and Jussi Parikka The Operational Loops of a Pandemic Biographies Jussi Parikka is Professor of Technological Culture at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Visiting Professor at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts, Prague. At FAMU, he leads the research project on Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023). His books include Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2 nd . Ed. 2016), Insect Media (2010), and A Geology of Media (2015). With Tony D. Sampson they co-edited The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn, and Other Anomalous Objects from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009). With Lori Emerson and Darren Wershler co- authored Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies forthcoming in 2021. Another forthcoming volume is the co-edited (with Tomas Dvořák) book Photography Off the Scale (2021). Tony D. Sampson is Reader in Digital Culture and Communications at the University of East London. His publications include The Spam Book, coedited with Jussi Parikka (2009), Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012), The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (2017) and Affect and Social Media: Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion, coedited with Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison (2018). His new book – A Sleepwalker’s Guide to Social Media – was published by Polity in 2020. Tony is the organizer and host of the Affect and Social Media international conferences in east London and a co-founder of the community engagement project, the Cultural Engine Research Group. Abstract