COMING SOON: PHOTO OBSCURA

I’m excited to announce that my book, Photo Obscura: The Photographic in Post-Photography (Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2025), is coming out this fall!

Photo Obscura argues that the profound transformation of post-photography is not merely a trend but a significant movement that redefines photography by integrating it with emerging technologies and creative practices, resulting in works that may not even resemble photographs but still retain a photographic influence. It is structured around various themes, including AI- generated images, the intersection of digital and physical art forms, and the changing relationship between visual representation and perception. Drawing on photo history, media studies, visual studies, art history, and the digital humanities it discusses specific artworks by Richard A. Carter, Stefanie Dinkins, Snow Yunxue Fu, Carla  Gannis, Pascal Greco, Claudia Hart, Auriea Harvey, Sophie Kahn, Ida Kvetny, Lev Manovich, Maria Mavropolou, Rosa Menkman, Colette Robbins, Penelope Umbrico, and Diana Velasco, providing insights into how post-photography continues to evolve, offering new ways to understand, define, and engage with the photographic image in the digital age. It highlights the influence of digital culture, where the abundance of images and information has led to novel approaches in art that question the very nature of photography, truth, and reality. Still, it maintains that despite this radical shift, photography's influence remains central, even when hidden or abstracted in the final work.

Photo Obscura is currently available for pre-order.

JUST PUBLISHED: THE FIRST CIRCLE ARCHIVE: RADICAL HUMANISM

After working diligently on this for many, many months with the artist Claudia Hart, I’m happy to announce the publication of The First Circle: Radical Humanism. It brings together a couple of critical essays and contributions from participating artists who were selected to participate for their pioneering work with computer technologies that laid the foundation for contemporary digital art. This group represents a wide range of mediums, artistic practices, and theoretical approaches who were asked to write brief testimonials about how their work began, what they initially thought they were doing with computers, and how they see their work today. This edited volume seeks to expand the current discourse on the history of digital art—highlighting the evolution of digital creativity outside of the framework that triangulates science, technology and industry—to demonstrate its relevance in today's artistic landscape.

Transmissionaries: A Talk with eteam at Roundabouts Now

I’m excited to be in conversation tomorrow afternoon with eteam (Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger) following a presentation of their artistic research over the last ten months in Taiwan. Their work explores the unexpected overlaps between Budaixi, traditional Taiwanese puppet theater, and handheld smart devices. They invoke religion, philosophy, storytelling methods, and GenAI tools to ask: Are there connections to be drawn between Puppet Stage and Social Feed, LLM’s and traditional speech patterns that generate and narrate epics, puppeteers and smart phone users, uploading and worshipping? Where do soul, processing power, artificial intelligence, and wisdom reside—and how are they transmitted? What can puppets do that humans can’t, and what roles do our human hands play in the production of the stories that shape our minds?

The presentation and conversation will take place at Roundabouts Now in Kingston, NY.

The First Circle: Radical Humanism OpenS this week at Microscope Gallery NYC

I’m pleased to announce that a group show I co-curated with the artist Claudia Hart opens this week at Microscope Gallery. 

The First Circle: Radical Humanism is a group exhibition featuring select works and performances from The First Circle Archive, a collection of artists whose early adoption of computers into their practice laid the foundation for contemporary digital art. Integrating a wide range of mediums, techniques, and theoretical approaches, this archive seeks to expand the current discourse on the history of digital art — highlighting the evolution of digital creativity outside of the framework that triangulates science, technology and industry — to demonstrate its relevance in today's artistic landscape.

The show is on view from July 17 — August 16, 2025.

JUST PUBLISHED: ENO: ALWAYS BEGINNING AND NEVER ENDING

I wrote about the generative documentary film Eno (Gary Hustwit / Brendan Dawes / Brian Eno) and connected Deleuze’s film theories, experimental and interactive film, database aesthetics, and computer games to explore a film in/as an endless state of becoming. It’s available online in Millennium Film Journal’s spring issue no. 81: Dedication.

Just published: Toward the Phygital Sublime

I’m excited to announce the publication of my profile of new media and post-photo artist Snow Yunxue Fu. “Snow Yunxue Fu: Toward the Phygital Sublime” appears in the March 2025 issue of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, which includes a feature on female Chinese new media artists.

OPENING THIS WEEK: FRANK WANG YEFENG'S AVATOPOLOGY

I’m excited to announce the opening of Avatopology, a solo exhibition I curated of Frank WANG Yefeng’s brilliant work at NARS Project Space in Brooklyn.

‘Avatopology’ explores a dialectic of control and submission among participants as they navigate the tricky terrain of creative collaboration. The work on view is the result of commissioned contributions by freelance creators around the world. It reflects the developing interpersonal relationships with the artist and the constraints on creative freedom as they each negotiate expectations, artistic identity, and the end result. 

Opening Reception Oct 4th, from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view through Nov 6th. The press release is linked here.

Just Published: Becoming camera in Virtual Photography

I’m honored to have my essay “Becoming Camera in Virtual Photography: A Player-Game-Camera Triangularity” included in the timely and illuminating edited volume Virtual Photography edited by Ali Shobeiri and Helen Westgeest. The book is published by transcript Verlag and available in print + through open access.

JUST PUBLISHED: MY REVIEW OF eteam’s + lololol’s SEMI-CONDUCTING HAND-HELD MOONS

I’m pleased to share the publication of my review of Semi-Conducting Hand-Held Moons, which appears in the spring 2024 issue of Millennium Film Journal. This collaborative group exhibition was held last fall at PS122 in New York City featuring work by two artist duos: NY-based eteam and Taiwan-based lololol.

Currently reading: If All the World and Love Were Young

This book of poems beautifully pairs poetry and the levels of Super Mario World to weave together memory, grief, and longing. These two poems, in particular, resonated with me:

DONUT GHOST HOUSE What is there to be afraid of? Whatever moves in the rafters / a sparrow’s nest in the chimney stuck with hay and pigeon feathers / a knock knock knock on the slate roof is hello yourself long ago / and hello an afterimage after all one image pressed to / and escaping through another. As the world of the living peers / out into the world of the dead as the isle is full of noises / as the draught catches the blue door as its keyhole’s made / of nothing / as the fireplace crackles and offers the light of the forest / the sparrow leaves its nest of eggs or maybe it doesn’t.

CHOCOLATE ISLAND 2 As Dürer sees it under the hides of carburised iron thick / as armour plating fixed in place with rivets pinned along / the seams / a polished gorget at the throat of the rhino is mostly passive. / What he got wrong hardly matters since he’d never seen / one himself / having just a poem a sketch imagination to go on / making magic of the mundane. And so the sun sets in the west / which is to be expected there over the marshes and deltas / I should like to describe to you having never been there myself.

Currently reading: Critical Hits — Writers Playing Video Games

“In playing [Disco Elysium] you discover a new animal, a new being, personal and derived from your own heart. New ways of thinking, about conversations you’ve had and will have, emerge.” — Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, “This Kind of Animal”

RE-READING: A HACKER MANIFESTO

In anticipation of its 30-year publication anniversary, I’m revisiting Mackenzie Wark’s groundbreaking text.

“It is through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and released. The virtual is not just the potential latent in matter, it is the potential of potential. To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds, beyond necessity” (014).

CURRENTLY READING: MONSTERS: A FAN'S DILEMMA

Despite the delicious admission, “But of course Picasso was an asshole” (92), this book disappoints in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Dederer set out to do the work of articulating something that doesn’t come easily: addressing the ethical and emotional issue of consuming art created by monstrous men. But instead she assembles a tired apology for the shitty men whose “artistic genius”—a term as absurd as “auteur theory”— took over their better judgment, and their vile behavior is merely the price we all pay for the creation of a so-called masterpiece. 

There is something about Dederer’s language — the ease with which she critiques the use of the term genius, yet so readily wields it herself, and often, as if it were fact — that leaves me frustrated and aching for something other than an apology or justification for her own participation in maintaining patriarchal hegemony by lionizing already celebrated artists (worthy of the label “monster”) and disguising it as critique.

Arguments are meandering, wobbly, and self-absorbed, and eventually the book devolves into memoir and reveals an inability to comprehend the value of a woman through a lens other than motherhood. It all culminates in a conclusion that completely falls apart and exposes Dederer as some kind of strange feminist monster-apologist who rails against cancel culture (in a desperately unexamined way), and posits we’re all monsters anyway, so why bother criticizing it? Ugh.

Currently Reading: How to Think Like a Woman

“I tend to think that if you’re a woman and you care about your freedom, you cannot help but harbor some anger and frustration. Whether it’s expressed in a thought to yourself or in an essay, to think like a woman, to produce and create like a woman, often involves anger. It’s a feature of a woman’s psyche as she comes into her own in a world that (still) does not want her to” (167).

“My investigation revealed to me something I didn’t expect: the female gaze is not a twentieth-century invention. It did not start with the suffragists, it did not begin with Mary Wollstonecraft, and it is definitely not unique to the West. It’s at least as old as philosophy itself. Women philosophers were not late to the scene; it seems they were there from the start, and they had much to say about their oppressive condition” (191).

rhizome 2023 microgrant recipient

I’m honored to be among the recipients of Rhizome’s 2023 Microgrant program. My plan is to write about Rosa Menkman’s performance-based live-glitching work The Collapse of PAL (2010). More on that following its publication.

Currently reading: Atlas of AI

“Over and over, we see the ideology of Cartesian dualism in AI: the fantasy that AI systems are disembodied brains that absorb and produce knowledge independently from their creators, infrastructures, and the world at large. These illusions distract from the far more relevant questions: Whom do these systems serve? What are the political economies of their construction? And what are the wider planetary consequences?” (215).

Announcing the opening of 404: erroR

The past few months, I’ve been working with :iidrr Gallery in New York City’s LES to organize 404: error, a group exhibition that explores how artists critically engage with errors, glitches, and other failures in their work in a provocative gesture toward new perspectives to redefine what we find problematic or correct. The show opens in less than two weeks, and I’m excited to see how the exhibition design comes together when the work is installed. More info in the press release here.

CURRENTLY READING: INTIMATIONS

“I always tell my students: ‘A style is a means of insisting on something.’ A line of Sontag’s. Every semester I repeat it, and every year the meaning of this sentence extends and deepens in my mind, blooming and multiplying like a virus, until it covers not just literary aesthetics and the films of Leni Riefenstahl but bedrooms, gardens, makeup, spectacles, camera angles, dances, gaits, gestures, sexual positions, haircuts, iPhone covers, bathroom taps, fonts, drink orders, dogs and people, and so much more—but people above all. Then semester ends and I forget all about it for a while” (53).

Donna Dennis's Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky Takes Over Private Public Gallery

I had the opportunity to meet with the visionary artist Donna Dennis at her studio in the Hudson Valley in advance of the opening of her exhibition at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY, which I reviewed for Chronogram.com.

“Despite the gravity of what this work suggests, Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky brings comfort. The entire gallery is transformed into a vessel for it, letting the meditative rhythm of the soundscape, the almost imperceptible shift from day to night, and the surrounding darkness overwhelm you. It offers a life in three acts, or a full life brought into view, in a tableau of reflection, resistance, and calm. Moreover, it creates the possibility of not only occupying but fully becoming a room of one’s own.”

The rest of my review can be accessed here.

Class Visit: Snow Yunxue Fu

I had the opportunity to invite the brilliant new media artist Snow Yunxue Fu to my Video Game Culture class to discuss her work in relation to the broad world of video games. We talked about the metaverse as a kind of game, the use of interaction + rule-based systems as expressive tools, the creation of digital humans, building inhabitable + explorable virtual worlds, and letting curiosity serve as a creative prompt.