Life in Pixels






























Geert Lovink is a Dutch media theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2002), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012), Social Media Abyss (2016), Organisation after Social Media (with Ned Rossiter, 2018) and Sad by Design (2019). In 2004 he founded the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). His center organizes conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (online video), The Future of Art Criticism and MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts). Recent projects deal with digital publishing experiments, critical meme research, participatory hybrid events and precarity in the creative sector. In December, 2021 he was appointed Professor of Art and Network Cultures at the Art History Department, Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam for one day a week.















Prof. Hans-Jörg Rheinberger was director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1997 to 2014. Rheinberger’s primary field of activity within the history of science is the epistemological exploration of the experiment and of the research practices of the natural sciences with focus on the biology of the 19th and 20th century. In his studies he describes “experimental systems” to be the driving forces within the development of the modern natural sciences. Additionally, he writes and publicizes essays and poems.
His latest book, 'Split and Splice: A Phenomenology of Experimentation' (University of Chicago Press, 2023) provides an innovative look at the experimental protocols and connections that have made the life sciences so productive, and brings into English what has already been a critical hit in the German speaking academia.













Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and Communication at Stanford University. Since Fall 2022, he is also Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. He is co-editor, with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, of the book series Sensing Media for Stanford University Press. He is also Co-Chair of the Philosophy and Theory SIG in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and Member-at-Large on the Executive Board of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). He is the author of three books: Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2014), Discorrelated Images (Duke University Press, 2020), and Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023). He is also co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016).

Professor Brooke Belisle researches and teaches the comparative history and theory of media aesthetics. Her work focuses on the recurrent disruptions and possibilities of “new media”, exploring emergent formats and experimental practices that echo across different periods of technological and social transformation. She is the Graduate Program Director for Stony Brook’s MA and PhD in Art History, directs the interdisciplinary Graduate Certificate in Media, Art, Culture, and Technology, and is Affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Belisle has published on contemporary photography and media art; experimental cinema; 19th century visual culture; immersive and interactive media from the panorama to VR; and the interwoven histories of art, science, and technology. Her book Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computer uses phenomenological and media-archeological methods to relate A.I.-driven techniques of computational imaging to overlooked spatial strategies of early photography.












Héctor Beltrán, the Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MIT, is a sociocultural anthropologist who draws upon his interdisciplinary background to study how the technical aspects of computing inform and are shaped by social structures and lived experiences of identity, race, ethnicity, class, and nation. Beltrán’s first book, Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands (Princeton, 2023), examines how Mexican and Latinx coders navigate a transnational economy of tech work and, in the process, develop a strong sense of their personal and political selves.

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media. His first book, Border Tunnels (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) examines how media forms and technologies shape perceptions about the borderlands and help reimagine the stakes of border-making practices.

Iván Chaar López is an assistant professor in Digital Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also leads the Border Tech Lab. His first single-authored book, The Cybernetic Border: Drones, Technology, and Intrusion (Duke University Press, 2024), shows how US borders are more than than instruments of blockage like walls or fences; since the mid-twentieth century they are regimes of datafication and racialization.




Prof. Tiziana Terranova is an Italian theorist and activist whose work focuses on the effects of information technology on society through concepts such as digital labor and commons. Terranova has published the landmore monograph Network Culture. Politics for the Information Age, as well as a more extensive number of essays and speeches, and appeared as a keynote speaker in several conferences. She lectures on the digital media cultures and politics in the Department of Human and Social Sciences, at the University of Naples, 'L'Orientale'. 

Prof. Ted Striphas (University of Colorado Boulder) studies the history, culture and politics of technology, focusing on the relationship between emergent technologies and patterns of social and linguistic change. His research and teaching are at the intersection of cultural studies, communication, the digital humanities and science and technology studies.
Striphas’ first book, The Late Age of Print, was published in 2009 by Columbia University Press and won the Book of the Year Award from the National Communication Association’s Critical-Cultural Studies Division. His research has appeared in leading scholarly journals including Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Journal of Communication, New Media and Society, New Formations and Television and New Media.











Matthew Kilbane is the Glynn Family Honors Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He teaches and writes about modern and contemporary poetry in the U.S., poetry and music, the history of sound technologies, and digital literary cultures. His first book, The Lyre Book: Modern Poetic Media (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), unfolds a disciplinary meeting place for literary and media studies around modern lyric poetry. The Lyre Book was awarded the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2021 Book Award, and has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Beinecke Library, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell.

Kilbane is currently extending this focus on lyric techniques and technologies in two newer projects: an edited collection of essays exploring how social media platforms are reshaping poetry’s publics around the world, and a study of community-based writing workshops and other marginalized institutions of verse making.













Lisa Messeri is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University. Her anthropological research focuses on the norms, aspirations, and consequences of work done by expert communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention. Her first book, Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds(Duke University Press), considers how “planet” is not only a cosmic concept, but also a humanistic one. Her new book, discussed here, In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual Reality, Los Angeles, and Fantasies of Technology Otherwise(Duke University Press), seeks to understand how the recent resurgence of virtual reality hinged on a belief that the technology could repair rifts in reality.
Through reading, teaching, and writing, she endeavors to link conversations in sociocultural anthropology with other fields of inquiry, including science and technology studies, media studies, cultural geography, environmental humanities, and history of science and technology. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, CNN, PBS, and more.

Jim Malazita (Ph.D. Drexel University) is Associate Professor of Science & Technology Studies and the Associate Director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He studies the co-production of technological and social elements of games and creative software, with a particular focus on game engines, gender, and race. His current work examines the role of game companies and game engines in shaping the infrastructural and legal standards of the future web. 
His new book, discussed here, Enacting Platforms: Feminist Technoscience and the Unreal Engine was released by the MIT Press in July 2024. This first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Malazita’s writing has been featured in a wide variety of academic venues, including in Digital Creativity, Design Issues, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Feminism in Play. His research and teaching have been supported by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the NEH Division of Educational Programs, the Popular Culture Association, The New Jersey Historical Commission, Red Hat Inc., and Rensselaer’s Teaching and Learning Collaboratory.






























Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC). He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). In 2021 he was elected as member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). His book Operational Images was published in May 2023. Parikka’s books have been translated into 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. He has also worked as curator, including as part of the curatorial team of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023, as well as the co-curator of the forthcoming Motores del Clima (Laboral, Gijon, 2023). http://jussiparikka.net.


Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist and curator, working in the areas of digital technologies and new media, ethics, photography and art. She is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. She is also a member of Creative AI Lab, a collaboration between King's and Serpentine Galleries. Prior to joining King's in 2021, she worked for many years at Goldsmiths, University of London, including as Co-Head of its Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has held visiting positions as Guest Professor at Shandong University in China, Winton Chair Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota, US, and Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University in Canada. Zylinska is the author of nine books - most recently, The Perception Machine (MIT Press, 2023, open access available), AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (Open Humanities Press, 2020, open access) and The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018, open access). Her work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Korean, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Zylinska combines her philosophical writings with image-based art practice and curatorial work. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 'Biomediations': Festival of New Media Art and Video in Mexico City. She has presented her work at many art and cultural institutions, e.g. Ars Electronica in Linz, CCCBarcelona, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Serpentine Galleries in London, SESC Sao Paolo and Transmediale in Berlin. Her book The Future of Media, co-edited with Goldsmiths Media, came out in 2022 - and is also available on an open-access basis.











Francesco Casetti is the Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. Among his books are Inside the Gaze; Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995; Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity; and The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. Francesco Casetti currently teaches courses on Semiotics, on Film and Media Theories, on Post-Cinema and Technical Images, and on Media and Space. He is the author of six books, translated into (among other languages) French, Spanish, Czech, and Korean; he is also co-author of two books, editor of more than ten books and special issues of journals, and author of more than sixty essays.











Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN), a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence that has received a €15 million grant from the Norwegian Research Council (2023-2033). She is also Principal Investigator of the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life: Playful Interactions with Visual Technologies in Digital Art, Games, Narratives and Social Media (2018-2024). Her most recent book is 'Machine Vision: How Algorithms are Changing the Way We See the World' (Polity Press, 2023).

James E. Dobson, assistant professor at Dartmouth College, is a literary and cultural critic who specializes in intellectual history and U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uses a number of approaches--theoretical, historical, formalist, and computational (sometimes called "digital humanities" or "cultural analytics")--to answer persistent intellectual problems. He is thus also interested in the critical analysis of twentieth-century and contemporary computation methods including machine learning, computer vision, and various approaches to text and data mining. The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), his third monograph, is a genealogy of computer vision and machine learning. It traces the development of a series of important computer-vision algorithms, uncovering the ideas, worrisome military origins, and lingering goals reproduced within the code and the products based on it, and examines how these became linked to one another and repurposed for domestic and commercial uses.














Anna Kornbluh is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Kornbluh's research and teaching interests center on the novel, film, and cultural aesthetics in theoretical perspective, including formalist, marxist, and psychoanalytic approaches. She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury "Film Theory in Practice” series, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics, Differences, and Portable Gray. She is a member of the UIC United Faculty bargaining team and the editorial boards of Novel, Mediations, Genre, and Parapraxis, as well as the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.












Laine Nooney (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Media and Information Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Nooney is a media scholar and historian of video games and personal computing. Their book projects include: 
- The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, a software history of the iconic Apple II personal computer, University of Chicago Press, Spring 2023
- Before We Were Gamers: Remembering and Forgetting an Industry's Dawn, which charts the rise, demise and unexpected resurgence of the flagship computer game company Sierra On-Line

Nooney’s work has been published in Game Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Information and Culture, American Journal of Play, Journal of Visual Culture, The Atlantic, and Digital Creativity. They are a founding editor of ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories and the Vice-Chair of Meetings for SIGCIS [the Special Interest Group for Computing, Information and Society].












Prof. Kate Marshall, an associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is a teacher and scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century media, literature, and communications systems. She has a background in technology journalism, and her earliest work deals with the temporalities of fiction that engaged with those being produced by new technologies and scientific epistemologies. In her first book, Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), she discusses literature’s mediality by way of its communication systems by looking at how communication is figured in the making-visible of infrastructure.

Her second book, Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (forthcoming University of Chicago Press, 2023), looks back on two decades of twenty-first century cultural production to account for the rise of genre hybridity in literary fiction.

She serves as the Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives and the Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame while also serving on the faculty of the History and Philosophy of Science, and on the steering committee for the Moreau College Initiative, a transformative prison education program. She is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, and co-edits the Post45 book series at Stanford UP.













Peter McDonald is an Assistant Professor of Design, Creative, and Informal Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW-Madison and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research explores the ways people interpret play and playful behavior as meaning-making activities, the design practices that can support critical engagement through play, and the historical contexts of playfulness. McDonald uses practice-based design research to build and study experimental forms of play, including alternate reality games, augmented reality games, and roleplaying games. His interests include play theory, media theory, feminist and queer methodologies, design research, and hermeneutics. His new book, Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer came out recently with MIT Press.

Pippin Barr is a video game maker, educator, and critic who lives and works in Montréal. He is a prolific maker of videogames, producing games addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to contemporary art and has collaborated with diverse figures such as performance artist Marina Abramovic and Twitter personality @seinfeld2000. Pippin is a well-known figure in the independent games world, serving as a judge or juror for many festivals, and his games have been covered in publications from the New York Times to Slate to Kotaku. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Lab, and a visiting lecturer in the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand on the subject of "videogame values." Pippin also writes a blog of game and game design criticism at pippinbarr.com and his book, How to Play a Video Game, introduces the uninitiated and culturally curious to the world of video games. His new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, came out with MIT Press recently.

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