My research and teaching interests revolve broadly around questions of mediality and mediation, including topics in film and media theory, literary and cultural studies, science studies, digital arts and humanities, and philosophy of technology. Drawing on resources from a variety of theoretical fields and interfacing them with various forms of practice, I am particularly interested in exploring new approaches to the materiality and mediality of culture and to the shape of experience within our increasingly globalized and technologically interconnected lifeworlds.
Several major topics and emphases can be distinguished as parts of my current program of research:
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One major research interest at present concerns the digital image as a vector of contemporary subjectivation and cultural formation. This research takes off from my work on post-cinema or the post-cinematic, which in my mind marks not so much a definitive break with cinema but rather an ongoing transformation of the once dominant media regime under the influence of digital technologies and attendant changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of moving-image media. I locate the primary impact of this transformation in a disruption of the embodied phenomenological relations that governed classical cinema, and in a sub-perceptual space of affective relation to technologies that is thereby opened up — but I contextualize such impacts also within the broader cultural spaces of a networked media environment and the changing conditions of aesthetic and political expression. This dual perspective allows me to engage in close readings of individual media objects, but also to correlate them with broader developments in social media, neoliberal capitalism, as well as material changes in camera and playback technologies.
In 2016, I co-edited (with Julia Leyda) a book of essays titled Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, with contributions from major theorists of the post-cinematic (including Steven Shaviro, Vivian Sobchack, Lev Manovich, Richard Grusin, Elena del Río, Mark B. N. Hansen, Adrian Ivakhiv, Francesco Casetti, and many others). The open-access book has been widely cited and praised as (in Alexander R. Galloway’s words) "the kind of volume that helps define and galvanize scholarly discourse."
Following publication of the edited collection, I continued to further develop my own approach to the topic in a monograph, titled Discorrelated Images, published by Duke University Press in 2020. There, I argue that the microtemporal processes involved in computational imaging undercut what Edmund Husserl calls the "fundamental correlation between noesis and noema," or the bond between perceptual consciousness and its intentional objects, thus inserting themselves into our embodied processing of time. As such, these "discorrelated" images, operating faster than human perception and cognition, are effectively able to anticipate and pre-format subjectivity. In contrast to cinematic images, which were memorial in their recording of the past, these new post-cinematic images are futural in their orientation — a fact that is revealed in both low-level technical processes (buffering, motion estimation, speculative execution) and high-level cultural agencies (recommendation systems on platforms ranging from Netflix to Google Maps). These futural dynamics have significant political, existential, and environmental ramifications that are just beginning to make themselves apparent.
My next book, Post-Cinematic Bodies, published in June 2023, takes these arguments farther, theorizing discorrelation (of the phenomenological sort discussed in the previous book) as opening the door to fine-grained re-correlations (of the statistical sort that is operative in machine learning and other computational processes). At stake here is not just the well-known phenomenon of "algorithmic bias" — such as has been amply demonstrated for Google search results and for the training sets at the heart of large language models and other machine learning applications — but the insertion of said biases into the embodied basis of experience and cognition, or a pre-formatting of the flesh itself. Drawing on contemporary media artists and philosophers alike, this work develops a political and phenomenological aesthetics for the digital age, foregrounding race, gender, and dis/ability as vectors within an emergent "metabolic capitalism" (forming around platforms and devices ranging from Apple Watches to Pelotons to VR, AR, and robotics).
Another ongoing research project concerns the nexus of seriality and mediality that structures modern media cultures from the Industrial Revolution to contemporary digital culture. One strand of this research (represented in several of my journal articles and book chapters) focuses particularly on the way that popular serial figures (such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Frankenstein, Dracula, Batman, or Superman) self-reflexively chart or "mediate" changes, transitions, and transformations of the larger media landscape. Incorporating studies of popular culture with approaches from the philosophy of technology, science studies, media theory, and media archaeology, I investigate the historical relations between serial figures and the media in which they have been staged. Mediality and media are conceived here as non-neutral, but also non-deterministic, "mediators" between the producers and recipients (viewers, readers, etc.) of serial narratives. Popular serial figures, according to the central thesis of this research (which stems from my participation in a major research unit funded by the German Research Foundation from 2010-2016), present an exemplary view of the processes of media transformation — processes that are generally visible only indirectly and in retrospect. A central focus is on the material formats of the negotiations and interactions between production and reception, i.e. publication technologies and techniques, mediating apparatuses, spatially manifest institutions, and the somatic-emotive perception of these framing conditions. The project articulates a theoretical framework for a plurimedial and historical comparison between long established and recurring figures in popular culture, e.g. Frankenstein, Dracula, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Superman. This comparison suggests that interactions between instances of production and reception, orbiting around serial figures as a gravitational point of attraction, are in fact part of a self-propelling or eigendynamischen process of serial development, not subject to the control of either side. The project takes a broad view of serial forms in modern media, including nineteenth century print forms, twentieth century film and broadcast media, and twenty-first century developments in the fields of narratively complex television, new media, and digital games.
Another strand of this research is devoted specifically to digital-era seriality, with particular focus on serialization practices in digital games and game cultures. Together with Andreas Sudmann, I received a major grant from the German Research Foundation to study "digital seriality" as it relates both to narrative and operational aspects of games, gaming cultures, and embodied interfaces. We co-authored an article titled "Digital Seriality," which appeared in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture (Vol 7.1, 2013), and we went on to co-edit a special issue of the journal (Volume 8.1, 2014) on this still undertheorized topic in game studies. Spinning off from this collaboration, I have also studied the figure of Batman as a plurimedial serial figure in video games and post-cinematic films, as a mediator of digital and interactive technologies and culture broadly, in an article published in 2020 in a special journal issue on "the philosophy of computer games" (Vol 11.1, 2020)
A current book project, tentatively titled The New Seriality, will take this research further, theorizing the role of serialization processes — which always involve a management of temporal unfolding (e.g. reminding viewers of what came before and foreshadowing future developments) — in the construction of identity and collectivity in digital media environments. Drawing on my previous work on the futural dynamics of computational media, and putting it into conversation with thinkers of "seriality" as a social formation (including Benedict Anderson, for whom seriality is at the heart of the "imagined communities" of nationality, proletariat, or ethnicity; Jean-Paul Sartre, in whose later, Marxist-inflected work seriality becomes the anonymous form of collectivity that responds to industrial capitalism's standardized commodities and built environments; or Iris Marion Young, for whom, building on and adapting Sartre, seriality becomes a lens for describing gender as both non-essential and non-voluntaristic, a matter of material and social interpellation), The New Seriality aims to uncover the spatio-temporal transformations of the social in an age of algorithmic media processes, with special focus on dynamics of class, gender, and race in digital environments. A first exploration and statement of the project appears as "The New Seriality" in the December 2023 issue of Qui Parle.
My first book, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (published 2014 by Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press), took Frankenstein films as the basis for an exploration of a broad media-philosophical terrain and set the stage for an ongoing engagement with topics of human-technological relations across media forms. In the book, I argued that representations of monstrosity in these popular films are matched by liminal spectatorial experiences and affects — bodily experiences that elude discursive capture and point to a domain of rich material transformation. I identified this domain as the "anthropotechnical interface," where human and technical agencies meet, and where media changes and transformations can be correlated to sweeping changes in the historical parameters of action and life itself. Philosophically, the book involves an intervention in the fields of speculative philosophy and posthumanism, with particular emphasis on technological and cultural parameters of experience; but, beyond mere speculation, the book (and the research that follows from it) focuses and derives these philosophical interventions from engagements with concrete media technologies and media texts. Thus, the book also involved a film-theoretical and media-historical component, focusing specifically on filmic adaptations or appropriations of Frankenstein.
In future research, I plan to return to the "techno-phenomenological" method developed in the book and apply it more specifically to contemporary digital media, including both visual and non-visual computational media and their relations to aesthetic and political formations. In the longer run, I see this research leading to a more systematic media-philosophical assessment that would account for the fine-grained transformations of perception, affect, and agency under the environmental conditions of digital media cultures. In the shorter run, I am developing a book project titled Art and Artificiality: Or, What AI Means for Aesthetics, in which I seek to assess the challenges to aesthetics (in both the broad sense of aesthesis as well as the narrow, modern sense of aesthetic judgement) introduced by art produced with machine-learning algorithms. I argue that AI is changing aesthetics at both of these levels: on the one hand, generative AI technologies like DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or GPT-4 are directly transforming artistic forms and practices (arguably dissolving, to a certain extent, the industrial-era wedge that was driven between art and tech); on the other hand, these same technologies are transforming the domain of sensation itself, opening up new objects of perceptual and cognitive experience, and changing the scope and parameters of embodied relation to the environment. Because these latter changes (changes in the broad field of aesthesis) pertain to a level of experience that is in many ways prior to and foundational for the domain of ethical deliberation, a new aesthetics is required for the age of AI. A first piece of this project, an article titled "From Sublime Awe to Abject Cringe: On the Embodied Processing of AI Art," appears in the August 2023 issue of Journal of Visual Culture.