Broadly, my research explores the relationship between digital media technologies, and contemporary American ideologies. Located at the intersections of new media poetics, visual art and culture, material studies, and critical race and gender discourse, I claim this interdisciplinary space as one that falls within the expanded field of digital humanities.
My current research asks how digital materiality — a layering of interface and database, where everything is ultimately reducible to computational code — challenges, complicates, or reinforces ideologies of race and racism in America. In my book project, Hypermaterial Language Art: Digitality, Materiality, and Contemporary Anti-Racist Poetics, I respond to this question by theorizing the operability of contemporary “colorblind” racism as digital. This argument develops through a combined formalist and materialist approach, wherein I apply a theoretical lens of digital materiality to a series of cross-media artworks to excavate what I call their “contemporary anti-racist poetics.” Two articles stem from this project: "From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest from 'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter'" (forthcoming in Criticism) and "The Alt-Social Network in Natalie Bookchin's Testament" (Television and New Media, July 2017, vol. 18, no. 5).
For more, see: Hypermaterial Language Art.
Where my book project is focused on literary, aesthetic, and poetic texts, my research more broadly also engages the ways digital, networked technologies affect contemporary culture and civic life. Issues like hashtag activism, vernacular rhetorics of the social web, data-collection, and user rights, therefore, also inform my work. This work is supported by two short publications: a forthcoming listicle in Buzzademia: Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular entitled "31 Truths of Teaching Cultural Semiotics in a General Education Class"; and a case study in Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) entitled "An #EpicFail #FTW: Considering Discursive Changes and Civic Engagement in #MyNYPD." As well, it animates my involvement in the Responsible End-User Licensing Lab at Georgia Tech.
For more, see: REUL Lab.
My current research asks how digital materiality — a layering of interface and database, where everything is ultimately reducible to computational code — challenges, complicates, or reinforces ideologies of race and racism in America. In my book project, Hypermaterial Language Art: Digitality, Materiality, and Contemporary Anti-Racist Poetics, I respond to this question by theorizing the operability of contemporary “colorblind” racism as digital. This argument develops through a combined formalist and materialist approach, wherein I apply a theoretical lens of digital materiality to a series of cross-media artworks to excavate what I call their “contemporary anti-racist poetics.” Two articles stem from this project: "From Float to Flicker: Information Processing, Racial Semiotics, and Anti-Racist Protest from 'I Am a Man' to 'Black Lives Matter'" (forthcoming in Criticism) and "The Alt-Social Network in Natalie Bookchin's Testament" (Television and New Media, July 2017, vol. 18, no. 5).
For more, see: Hypermaterial Language Art.
Where my book project is focused on literary, aesthetic, and poetic texts, my research more broadly also engages the ways digital, networked technologies affect contemporary culture and civic life. Issues like hashtag activism, vernacular rhetorics of the social web, data-collection, and user rights, therefore, also inform my work. This work is supported by two short publications: a forthcoming listicle in Buzzademia: Scholarship in the Internet Vernacular entitled "31 Truths of Teaching Cultural Semiotics in a General Education Class"; and a case study in Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) entitled "An #EpicFail #FTW: Considering Discursive Changes and Civic Engagement in #MyNYPD." As well, it animates my involvement in the Responsible End-User Licensing Lab at Georgia Tech.
For more, see: REUL Lab.