Mal Ahern (she/her/hers)

I am a historian of media interested in technologies, formats, processes, and people. I aim to put labor at the center of stories about media technology. My teaching and writing offer concrete accounts of how media technologies work while critiquing common assumptions about technological progress. One thing this means is that I love bringing old machines into the classroom: I am developing a teaching collection of historical media technologies that includes game consoles, projectors, television tubes, and other devices. In the department of Cinema and Media Studies I teach undergraduate courses on the the history of "new" media, glitch aesthetics, media labor, and feminist media theory, as well as graduate seminars in media archeology, historiography, and research methods.

I am currently writing a book about how automation and computational control transformed the mass production and distribution of images in the decades after World War II. Automation radically changed the work taking place in printing pressrooms, film laboratories, projection booths, and television transmitter sites. Drawing on labor process theory and critiques of technological progress, I argue that automation deskilled once specialized professions and transformed widely held standards of image quality and uniformity. This history reveals that, for decades before the emergence of digital screen media, other forms of digital control were at work in analog mass media technology. This technology did not always do its job particularly well, either: the postwar decades saw an increase in visible misalignments, misprints, interference, noise, and other kinds of error. Automation's failures—apparent in glitches, errors, and misprints—also transformed fine art and mass culture in this period.

I am also publishing a series of articles about air conditioning. I argue that air conditioning is a medium, one central to the development of 20th Century visual culture. The first regards air conditioning's transformation of media through a new kind of atmospheric work discipline (Discourse), the next two are on the labor and politics of conservation, written for the e-flux architecture project "After Comfort: A User's Guide." Here is part one.

I have also published essays on the photographic index and its relation to technological process (diacritics), (World Picture); on Andy Warhol's Screen Tests and the mechanical production of gossip (NECSUS); on Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (The Viewing Platform). Other work in The New Inquiry and other venues listed below.

My PhD is in Art History and Film & Media Studies with a certificate in Technologies of Knowledge. My research has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Simpson Humanities Center, the UW Royalty Research Fund, and most recently the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Before coming to UW I taught at Bard College. Before entering academia I was a collection cataloger and registrar at Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY.

Other interests include experimental film, Marxist theory, psychoanalysis, and 19th century media technology. I collect printer's errors, glitches, and other failures of mass production, so please send them as you find them.