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Biography
I am a historian of media interested in technologies, formats, processes, and people. I aim to put labor and materiality at the center of stories about media technology. I am a recent fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). I am currently a Signature Course Fellow at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and the Common Good where I am developing a UW course called, "Being Human with Technology."
I am currently writing a book about the relationship between automation and visual media. I examine the technological transformation of printing pressrooms, film laboratories, projection booths, and television transmitter sites during the decades after World War II. As early as the 1940s, new modes of digital control transformed both work practices and craft standards in the mass production of images. Linking these transformations with the emergence of film and photography, as well as recent developments in digital image production, I argue that efforts to replace human with machine labor in the visual arts has one of two outcomes: Automation either produces new forms of labor, or produces new kinds of error or variation in the mass image. These patterns provide deep historical context for current debates about (so-called) "AI" and about the role of human labor in digital modes of image generation and circulation.
My other project regards the history of air conditioning in 20th century visual culture. I have published two essays in e-flux architecture on museum's responses to global climate change which narrate the long history of how air conditioning was incorporated into the modern art gallery (e-flux 1) and the emergence of the field of sustainable conservation (e-flux 2). I have also argued that air conditioning's postwar boom contributed to modernist aesthetics in both painting and print media by introducing new ideas about the relationship between image and labor (Discourse).
I have also recently published essays on the relationship of factory automation and recording (diacritics) and on Andy Warhol's Screen Tests and the mechanical production of gossip (NECSUS). Other interests include environmental media, media materiality, Marxist theory, formal analysis, and 19th century photography.
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 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.