Research

My research is situated at the intersection of media, infrastructure and cultural form. It studies how major infrastructural change is reflected in contemporary cultural and social practice. The increasingly diffuse and abstract nature of infrastructural space makes understanding its effect on cultural phenomena more urgent than ever. No longer a static and neutral background against which social and cultural activity dynamically proliferates, infrastructures are becoming as porous, multi-scalar and complex as the human societies entangled within them.

My dissertation, “The Logistical Mode of Production: Logistics as a Total Way of Life” argues that the infrastructural form most significantly affecting social relations today is the global supply chain. As the foundation of the world’s economy, the supply chain lays the groundwork for how commodities circulate the globe, summoning nearly all available infrastructure on earth to do so. As its complexity grows, the supply chain has moved beyond its original sphere of overseeing commodity flows towards an altogether new form of logistical governance that comprehensively monitors everything from the remotest reaches of the world’s trade routes to the most mundane routines of people’s everyday lives. Through close investigations of companies like Amazon, Uber, TaskRabbit, and Deliveroo; I examine how their deployment of GPS, RFID, smartphones, and other logistical media have created a “social supply chain” that optimizes the circulation of people as much as the commodity supply chain governs the circulation of goods.

My next project builds on my study of media infrastructures to examine their growing integration into the entertainment industry. Music, film, television, and video games increasingly utilize digital technologies that exceed our embodied perception (prediction algorithms, eye-tracking technology, and artificial intelligence) to granularly track and monitor our viewing habits. Such technologies have even begun being used to create original content. My article, “Uneasy Listening: Towards a Hauntology of AI-Generated Music,” (Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, May 2020) focuses on the rise of AI-generated music, i.e. original compositions produced by machine learning algorithms trained on a selected musical archive. I examine the cultural, political, and philosophical ramifications of AI music’s growing indiscernibility from human-authored music making.