Research Interests
Mike Sockol is an interdisciplinary scholar in the areas of visual art, cinema and media studies, philosophy, critical theory, technology studies, and Marxism. His research centers on transformations in the image after digitization and financialization.
His dissertation, "Image Assets: The Aesthetics of Digital Accumulation, 1998-2025", investigates the role of digital media in financial capitalism. Explored through three prominent digital media forms (smartphone, digital cinema, and data centers), "Image Assets" argues that since the 1990s, images have shifted from being commodities to assets—unique sites of capital accumulation shaped by the extractive and rent-seeking imperatives of financialized profit making. Contesting the capacious notion of "the digital" by bridging medium theory and political economy, the project aims to read these technologies as texts to reperiodize the digital era through the distinct regimes of accumulation they subtend.
Areas of Interest:
Aesthetic theories of modernity, German Idealism, philosophy of technology, irrationalism, phenomenology, critical theory, media theory, documentary studies, 20th and 21st century art history, information studies, the aesthetics of everyday life, critical internet studies, Western Marxism, environmental humanities