Overview
I am a cinema and media scholar, working in Film and Digital Media Theory & Philosophy and affiliated fields. My work is dedicated to thinking about cinema as a heterochronic composite, or a multiplicity—one that entwines various cultural structures of intermediations and different models of philosophical thinking-becoming. Invested in broadening the scope of “Film Philosophy,” I trace the intermedial and polymorphic transmutations of cinema in relation to various other related audio-visual media. My main concern throughout is to show that cinema is a historically variable process of technohuman mediation, which interacts constantly and renewably with other medial operations and produces modes of existence and thought from this intermedial position.
Ranging from explorations in classical and contemporary cinema and media studies, to directions within literary and critical theory, cultural studies, and continental European philosophy (aesthetics, metaphysics, phenomenology) I focus on current debates of the digital era and its impact on our engagements with media forms and society. This leads me to questions of technological ontology and evolution, representation, reality and truth, and spectatorship, agency and ethics.
My first monograph, From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) addresses the impact of digitization on the discipline of Cinema Studies, as this relates to our understanding of film ontology (primarily from a Deleuzian, Merleau-Pontian and Cavellian perspective).
I am now in the late stages of a new manuscript (to be published by Duke University Press) titled The Interactive Spectator. In this, I aim to detach “interactivity” from a specifically computational framework, proposing instead that interactivity is a medial faculty inherent to media experiences, old and new. Taking as my starting point the etymological and historical origins of the term in theatrical performance (the “interact” as “entr’acte”), I make a case for understanding the differences between an analog and digital medial era by focusing on the entanglement between spectatorial and interactive models of mediatization. While the two models coalesce in our overall encounters with visual technologies, they appear in different dominant and subordinate positions depending on the particularity of the foregrounded technology each time. Such a rereading allows us to witness a shift from a chronic era of mediatization (photography, cinema, and television) to a kinetic era with the development and establishment of digital computation. This project also introduces the interpretative possibilities for media analysis presented in the work of various thinkers, primarily that of Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, Alfred Gell, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, René Gigard, Rosi Braidotti, and Judith Butler.
I welcome the opportunity to advise students (undergraduate thesis writers or graduate students in all stages of their PhDs) who are interested in doing research in cinema studies or audio-visual media studies more broadly, from a theoretical/philosophical perspective.
