Mal Ahern (she/her/hers)

I am a historian working on the relationship between automation and visual media. My published and forthcoming work examines the tensions between human labor and machine process in photography, printing, and screen media. I am interested in how technologies that claim to be "labor-saving" create new forms of labor (and new forms of error). At UW, I teach undergraduate courses such as History of New Media, Glitch, Digital vs. Analog, and Being Human with Technology, as well as graduate seminars on historiography, technology, and aesthetics. 

My forthcoming book, Factory Forms, is a materialist history of the "mass image" in the postwar United States. The book examines changing labor practices and aesthetic values in printing pressrooms, film laboratories, projection booths, and television transmission as these industries started to incorporate new modes of numerical and feedback control. A related essay, "Cinema's Automatisms and Industrial Automation," won the Annette Kuhn award in 2020. It argues for replacing the concept of photographic indexicality with that of machine error, or inscription without feedback. 

Most recently I co-edited, with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, a dossier on Images and Infrastructures for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), in which I co-wrote the short intro "Modes of Visual Production" and published the short piece called "Media Infrastructure and Historical Materialism." 

I also also publish on the history of air conditioning in visual culture. "Climate Control and Modernist Aesthetics" attributes the flatness and opticality of postwar color printing and modernist painting alike to AC's transformation of labor; a two-part essay in e-flux architecture links museum climate control with the concurrent emergence of the "white cube" gallery (e-flux 1, e-flux 2). 

I am currently a Signature Course Fellow at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and the Common Good where I developed a new University of Washington course called "Being Human with Technology," in which students contemplated technology in a screen free classroom, read from a paper course pack, and completed weekly creative projects such as "Get Distracted," "Build a Drawing Machine," and "Memorize a Poem." 

I am a recent fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). My PhD is in Art History and Film & Media Studies with a certificate in Technologies of Knowledge. 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. I am also an amateur darkroom photographer currently experimenting with stereography.