Research Interests
Mike Sockol is an interdisciplinary scholar in the areas of photography, visual art, cinema and media studies, critical theory, technology studies, and Marxism. More specifically, his research centers on transformations in the image after digitality and financialization.
Taking media as proliferating potential zones of surplus in a territorially exhausted capitalism, Mike's dissertation applies medium theory to political economy to identify the complex extractive operations latent in everyday media aesthetics. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Extractive Images: The Aesthetics of Reflexive Accumulation in Digital Capitalism, 1991-2024", investigates the infrastructural role media and storage technologies occupy in financialization, mapping correspondences between intensive, financial modalities of accumulation and the phylogeneses of the specific digital media which subtend and reflect them. Explored through the two most prominent extractive images in digital capitalism—the telephonic image and the acquisitional image—the project addresses capitalism's turn inward via the vernacularization of photography with the camera phone and the enumerative hypertextuality in Hollywood films after financial consolidation. "Extractive Images" argues that in digital capitalism, images become a site of capital accumulation as the conditions of their production are increasingly shaped by the imperatives of financialized profit making.
Areas of Interest:
Aesthetic theories of modernity, photography, technical images, the history of the image, cultural techniques, critical theory, media theory, the documentary form, cognitive capitalism, information economies, the aesthetics of everyday life, mobile media cultures, critical internet studies, Western Marxism, representations of environment, and the aesthetics of process and accumulation in photography and film