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 on the History of Media Technology, Glitch Aesthetics, and History of New Media, and graduate seminars in Historiography 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. Technologies that increased the volume and velocity of image reproduction also displaced the skilled technicians who controlled the flow of images. Factory Forms argues that image reproduction was a strategically vulnerable chokepoint in postwar media industries—a fact that helps explain subsequent enthusiasm for decentralized modes of image distribution. 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. 

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 have also published on Warhol's Screen Tests, Muybridge's and LeWitt's grids, and other topics. 

I am a recent fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and 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." 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.