Research

I am currently working on two book-length projects. The first, tentatively titled Shot Screens, explores the history of the computer screenshot, and of the ways we have historically pictured computing in the broadest sense. Screenshots are one of the most pervasive visual forms in circulation today, but their application is wildly variable and largely dependent on the cultures of use in which they are situated. To understand the screenshot as a unified technique for the mediation of computational systems, this book traces the multiple and competing histories of the screenshot and its evolution alongside the graphical computer throughout the 20th century. Ultimately my goal is to examine the screenshot as a window into the mundane and vernacular cultures of everyday computing, asking how we mediate computation through existing visual forms, and how this mediation transforms the ways we use and understand computation itself.

My second project, tentatively titled On Uncomputable Numbers, proposes a queer theory of computing through a set of queer and non-binary figures in the early history of mathematics and computation. Extending Alan Turing's theoretical work on uncomputability from 1936, the book looks to articulate a queer externality to so-called universal computation. This project began in 2013 as a series of popular articles for the art and technology organization Rhizome, and is currently in preparation as both an original manuscript and a set of collaborative research projects with scholars and artists across queer theory and the digital humanities.