research

My first book project, titled Rendering, shows how social relations and ideologies move through machines, looking first at how they get hard-coded into media technologies and then how these political machines contort and reproduce those ideologies. Infusing a media-oriented study of computer architecture into the politico-cultural history of computer graphics, this project narrates a history of the computer as a rendering machine. Standing at the intersection of the historiographies of technology, media, race, and culture, and grounded on my study of recently-made-available corporate and federal archival materials, trade literature, oral histories and conference proceedings, my project highlights the movement from ideology to computation and computation to ideology. These moves find their home in computational maps, diagrams, graphs, plans, and sketches, which Rendering investigates to ask: how does our culture render diagrams for machines that do not yet exist, how did these machines come to render the graphical world around us, and what is the relationship between these two movements? As ideology becomes increasingly computational, I propose rendering as a theoretical and analytical concept to study these material-virtual translations. I've given a number of talks on this topic and two publications from this project have been published in Critical Inquiry and Configurations.