NECS 2023

At the 2023 NECS conference in Oslo, I presented my paper “The Family Diagram: Engineering the Domestic from the Gilbreths to the Palo Alto Group.” I compared how Frank and Lilian Gilbreth measured thermodynamic efficiency in the factory and home to how Gregory Bateson reconceptualized domestic efficiency in terms of cybernetics and media inscription.

U. Chicago Silly Media 2022

At the 2022 University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media graduate student conference, I presented my paper “Bedtime Stories for Small Appliances: The Animated Choreographies of Commodity Destruction.” This paper considered the rise in media content featuring dancing, singing, and otherwise animated commodities facing impending obsolescence (e.g., The Brave Little Toaster franchise; the hydraulic press TikToks of @smacmcreanor).

Rutgers Comparative Lit. 2021

At the 2021 Biannual Rutgers Comparative Literature conference, I presented my paper “What’s Inside: Hapticity, Laying-Waste, and the Globalized Commodity.” Here I frame the visual grammar of the ‘cut-away view’ as a diagrammatic negotiation with the complex, opaque structures of modernity.

ACLA 2022

At the 2022 ACLA conference, I presented my paper “Soliciting Feedback: Recursion, Contingency, and the Cyberfeminist Imaginary.” Thinking alongside Lynn Hershman Leeson’s 1997 film Conceiving Ada, I explored how the operative framework of computational language (particularly feedback, contingency, and recursion, can be used to help us understand how white, bourgeois feminisms are continually reinscribed in speculative fiction.

SCMS 2021

At the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, I presented my paper, “Hack Your Brain: The Hacker Film, the Mind Game Phenomenon, and the New Millennium.” By examining a range of hacker films from the 1990s, I considered how the thematic elements of the hacker film (abstraction, speculation, simulation) became ontologically constitutive of the post-9/11 Mind Game Film.

New Centre for Research + Practice 2020

At the 2020 New Centre for Research and Practice conference, I presented my research on the “What’s Inside” genre of digital media content. Connecting this fad to Industrial-era table-turning, I trace a brief history of haptic and destructive investigations of commodity forms.

USC First Forum 2020

At the 2020 USC First Forum conference, I presented my paper, “Glitch/Grain/Sync: Towards a Minor Language of Technological Reproduction.” Taking a cue from Deleuze and Guattari, I consider the political implications of “passing” as a whole, organic, and integrated entity on slice-and-stitch digital media platforms.