Mal Ahern (she/her/hers)

I am a media theorist working at the intersection of visual studies and the history of 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.

My current book project, "Factory Forms," is a materialist history of the technologically reproducible image. It investigates the skilled labor that reproduces images in photographic and motion picture laboratories, printing pressrooms, projection booths, and television engineering sites, including control rooms and transmitters. After WWII, automation and new forms of computation infiltrated these industries, spurring strikes and other labor struggles. 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 that imagine air conditioning as 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 is a two-part article on sustainable conservation and museum architecture in the e-flux architecture project "After Comfort: A User's Guide." Here is part one.

I have also published essays on photographic automatism and industrial automation (diacritics), the drawn grid and the trace (World Picture), Andy Warhol's Screen Tests (NECSUS), and 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.