Research Interests
Mike Sockol is an interdisciplinary scholar whose areas of interest include photography, visual art, cinema and media studies, critical theory, technology, and Marxism. More specifically, his research centers on transformations in the photographic image post-digitality, while current research preoccupations center around the relation between media and extraction and how mobile media modify narrative and aesthetic production.
Understanding 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 and 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 under conditions of globalization and financialization, charting the phylogeneses of distinct forms of digital media and their images as necessarily corresponding to the variegated extractive operations of digital capitalism as they adopt more flexible, financialized, and intensive modalities of accumulation. Explored through the two most prominent forms of extractive images in digital capitalism—the telephonic image and the accumulative image—the project frames contemporary digital media and its images as both reflecting and subtending a shift to intensive and reflexive modes of accumulation. It offers a genealogical account of these image forms through specific media, addressing the vernacularization of photography through the camera phone and the increasing aesthetics of enumeration in Hollywood film after private equity consolidation. "Extractive Images" ultimately argues that in digital capitalism, images become a site of capital accumulation more so than ever as their production and circulation are increasingly shaped by the imperatives of financialized methods of extraction.
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