Research
Research Interests
My research bridges media studies, digital humanities, and the environmental humanities to study how media technologies facilitate our understanding of the natural world. Broadly, my work proposes new theoretical approaches to media studies that understand the environment as both the materials from which media are made as well as cultural knowledge formations that media themselves shape—the interplay of which condition the possibilities for sustainable human life on our planet. Alongside my dissertation, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination,” I maintain research interests in: weather forecasting, speculative fiction, nuclear cultures, digital humanities, cybersecurity, media archaeology, and software emulation.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Air-conditioning the Internet: Data Center Securitization as Atmospheric Media.”
An article about the total heat death that awaits all data and the infrastructural technologies data centers employ to delay it, although they can never eliminate it entirely.
An article about computational weather prediction and cultural techniques, featuring extreme weather, cartographic aesthetics, and more calculus than you might expect.
Short Articles & Reviews
“Collective Tissue.”
A brief reflection on the human breath and the mediation of geologic time.
Web
A review of Tim Maughan’s speculative fiction novel Infinite Detail, in which I ask what media might look like after the end of the internet. Permalink.
A short piece on photographer Patrick Nagatani’s Nuclear Enchantment and the challenges of visualization and representation in the post-nuclear world. Permalink.
Presentations
Conference Talks
Continuing my ongoing research into HVAC in data centers, this talk explores the technology’s relationship to the maintenance of the security state.
A talk about breath, media, and temporality, as part of a panel on environmental media.
A talk about two technologies that control the planet: air conditioning and the internet.
How might digital humanities projects negotiate the ethical challenges of the Middle Passage? And what can environmental and oceanic critique teach us about how to value indeterminacy in data-driven work?
A talk that reads how-to-stay-secure-online guides as paranoid, speculative visions of an internet yet to come.
A short paper using hacks of Flappy Bird and Super Mario World to explore “haunting” as a media archaeological practice, one that exposes fault lines along the circulations of technological waste, supply chains, and resource extractions.
Part of a deformance/panel with Kyle Bickoff, Setsuko Yokoyama, and Andy Yeh engaging 3D printing technologies across media archaeological and archival registers. My contribution uses smell as an entrypoint to explore movements of manufacturing and affect in plastics production.
What can large-scale hackings of Internet of Things devices teach us about what we imagine our relationships with them to be, particularly when our desires for sociability clash with our need to be secure?
“Undergraduate Digital Humanities, Three Ways.”
I was invited to speak at a NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program) conference called “Emerging Digital Scholars: Undergraduates and Digital Humanities” on strategies Five College Digital Humanities uses to encourage student research and engagement with the digital humanities.
Roundtables & Panels
A roundtable I chaired with Purdom Lindblad, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, and Kim Bain on strategies for centering environmental justice and decolonial thinking in digital humanities work.
“Breath Control: 3D Printing and Environmental Media.”
A poster version of an alternate universe version of my first dissertation chapter, developing environmental approaches to maker culture and media toxicity.
A roundtable with Kyle Bickoff and Setsuko Yokoyama on the textuality of platforms. My paper close reads the GitHub repository of Paul Ford’s “What is Code?” to think through the version control site’s pervasive logics of hypervisibility and auto-surveillance.
“The Critical Is: Mapping New Approaches to Video Game Criticism.”
A poster emerging from The_Critical_Is, engaging new approaches to critical video game pedagogy.
Digital Projects
I led a phase of website conceptualization and design for the digital accompaniment to Lisa Brooks’ book Our Beloved Kin, published in 2019 by Yale University Press.
An introduction to and exploration of electronic literature and Internet art, comprising pop-up IRL and URL galleries, workshops, and a screening program.
Essays, maps, and interactive visualizations on Black life, trauma, and social media. I wrote about some of my preliminary work with the Twitter API on my blog here.
A project I co-edited exploring new ways of teaching, writing, and thinking about video games and interactive narratives. My collaborators and I presented a poster at HASTAC 2015; I shared the essay “Strange Creatures Made of Memory,” on glitch aesthetics and new possibilities for play. Funded by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.
In collaboration with Jon Caris and Eric Poehler, a hybrid makerspace and workgroup exploring, historicizing, and critiquing creative robotics in the undergraduate classroom and the world at large. Funded by Five College Digital Humanities.