Vita
April 2017 - July 2017 Research Fellow at the IKKM, Weimar
August 2014 - Present Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture, Stony Brook University, SUNY
Dated from 2017
Fields of research
Media Philosophy Media History, Cinema Studies, Contemporary Media Arts, History of Computing, Science and Technology Studies, Queer Studies, Media Archaeology
IKKM Research Project
Image Objects
Image Objects offers a material history of early computer graphics told through a set of five technical objects: an algorithm, an interface, an image standard, a programming language, and a hardware platform. Asking what it means to write a material history of a supposedly immaterial practice - visual simulation - the book explores how theories of visibility, memory, and textuality have been inscribed into the infrastructure of computer graphics as both a technical medium and a cultural practice. Ultimately the project argues that, in large part due to the development of computer graphics as the visual simulation of material objects, the field of computer science shifts in the midcentury from a discipline of procedural calculation and mathematical problem solving into an interactive medium with a distinct ontological claim. This claim is supported by extensive archival research, with particular focus on the collections of the ARPA-funded research center at the University of Utah, founded in 1965 as the first research program for computer graphics in the United States.
Recent publications
“Other Places of Invention: Utah and the History of Computer Graphics” in Communities of Computing: Computer Science and Society in the ACM. New York: ACM Books (2016).
"Sounding Silence: Noise Reduction and Amplification as Sonic Mediation" Continent. Special Issue: Acoustic Infrastructures. 5.3. (2016)
“Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object,” Journal of Visual Culture 14, no. 1 (2015) pp. 40-60.