Research Statement 

I research the ways that technology reconfigures core aspects of human experience.  Drawing from phenomenology, mediation theory, and critical studies, I examine how emerging and existing technologies co-constitute subjectivity, perception, relationality, and meaning-making within a shared techno-capital context.  More specifically, my work aims to clarify how technologies such as brain-computer interface (BCI), mixed reality (MR), and artificial intelligence influence normative aspects of human experience and agency.  I also investigate how emerging technologies play into and reconfigure existing disability, gender, race, and class tropes, and how this interplay is shaped by corporate, state, and social forces.  Human-technology relations are a genuine wonder, but they are also easily abused, so I also explore how artistic and creative practices and concepts can open alternative and less exploitative modes of human-technology relations.  In this way, my research is fundamentally political and collaborative as well as philosophical, informed by relationships I have built with artists, scientists, technologists, and other philosophers.  Altogether, my work aims to provide accounts of how art, theory, and good pedagogy can resist the more control-oriented trends of mass technologies.

Much of my ongoing work focuses on “aesthetic” or poetic technologies such as film and visual art, and on technologies that change the way we “interface” with the world, such as BCI and MR.  I currently have three articles along these lines their way to publication:  “Living Present—Time, Greif, & the Tree of Life: Merleau-Ponty on the Techno-Phenomenology of Film,”[1]  “Overcoming Life: Neuralink, Cyborgs, & the Political (An)aesthetics of Cure,”[2] and “On Multiple Realities”:  Fringes, Liminality, & Transitionalities Between Digital & Virtual World.”[3]  Each of these papers develops a different component of a general reflection on the relationship between artistic modes of human-technology relations, and advance arguments which take seriously ways that even the most basic components of human experience are mediated by technologies.  I also have two other papers currently under review on adjacent themes: "Perceptual Presence, Perceptual Constancy, & the Aesthetic Temporality of Style" that uses the aesthetic concept of style and reflections from Merleau-Ponty to suggest a new approach to personal “identity,” and “Non-Comparability Problems & Hedonic Tone Accounts of Well-Being.”

The above work and several other papers in late draft stage are intended to pave the way for three interrelated research trajectories.  The first, already well under way, aims to provide a phenomenological articulation of the way that aesthetic and artistic projects co-constitute personal and social temporalities and thereby influences normative conceptions of meaning and experience.  Tentatively titled “Time, & Trans|gression:  A Techno-Phenomenology of (An)aesthetic Experience” and based on my dissertation, this project argues that technologies, poetic and otherwise, reconfigure our sense of time and, in so doing, help us to organize our social and personal lives.[4] 

The second trajectory builds on “Overcoming Life,” a paper which drew on disabilities studies (Eli Clare and Allison Kafer), critical phenomenology (Jonathan Sterne), and feminist philosophy (Cressida Heyes) to argue that current brain computer interface (BCI) technologies (such as Elon Musk’s “Neuralink”) express and depend on a pernicious political aesthetics of “cure.”  Latent in this paper is a more thoroughgoing critique of “transhumanism,” a political imaginary which takes the value of human life to be rooted in our capacity to “transcend” ourselves.  My approach is particularly salient because it problematizes the recent obsession with generative AI as both an impending existential crisis and as an essential component of augmented human futures.  I plan to develop this critique into a book length account of the philosophical and historical roots of transhumanism and an exploration of alternative artistic conceptions of human value under the heading of cyborg “body poetry.”

The third trajectory relates more directly to my work on VR and MR.  Inspired by Don Ihde’s mediation theory and J.J. Gibson’s notion of environmental affordances, I argue that we can understand specific technologies as reducing or increasing friction along different vectors or possible pathways of action.  In virtue of reducing friction along one dimension, technologies make more likely that that specific pathways of action will be followed while other possible pathways are made less accessible.  The degree of friction encountered to accomplish a task shapes normative features of experience and society.  For example, ChatGPT reduces friction between a student and the task of producing an essay, but obscures pathways that would allow students to develop the skills needed to become good writers.  As a result, and at scale, ChatGPT encourages students to offload the task of paper writing, and thereby stresses the end product (the paper) rather than the process and the contingencies that arise along the way.  Conceived more as a series of articles than a book, I plan to argue that the technological friction framework can be generalized and that it demonstrates how the creators of technologies are able to subtly manipulate social normativity at scale by reconfiguring agential engagement with frictional incentive structures, usually in a way that maximizes capital interests and that can push political and social agendas. 

Concurrently, I am working to contribute to public and academic conversations about art, technology, and society.  I am in conversation with the American Society for Aesthetics to plan a special issue The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on “AI and Cyber Art,” and I am working to recast some of my work on Neuralink and mixed reality for a more popular audience.  Like my academic endeavors, my artistic practice is both highly collaborative and interdisciplinary.  My current primary project, field|guide¸ is a curated multimedia art and literature journal that brings together scholars, artists, filmmakers, and musicians[5] to reflect on liminalities and ambiguities in the digital age.  Philosophy, art, technology, and politics are woven into the roots of our shared humanity, and this artistic practice is central to my life as a researcher, teacher, and politically engaged human being living in a world filled with wonderfully varied and dynamic perspectives.  As in all aspects of my life as thinker, I seek to trace the layered pathways of these threads, highlighting where they intersect and overlap, and drawing attention to ways that they can be more justly and evocatively rewoven.  

[1] R&R for in philosophies for a special issue on “Cinema & Philosophy” edited by Bernd Herzogenrath (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt).

[2] Under review at The Journal of Technoetic Arts, associated with Taboo – Transgression – Transcendence in Art & Science.

[3] Forthcoming in Finding Our Place in the Digital World (Springer) collected volume, edited by Ian Werkheiser (UTRGV) and Michael Butler (University of North Dakota).

[4] Bernd Herzogenrath, editor of the thinking|media series (Bloomsbury Academic) invited me to submit my book-length manuscript this past summer.  The proposal should be completed in the next few months.

[5] Including philosophers like Babette Babich (Fordham) and Jaime Dow (Hendrix College), scientists like Tuomo Suntola (Helsinki), poets like Ava Winter and Alicia Mountain, filmmakers like Russell Sheafer, and musicians like Jennie Gottschalk, Andre Mestre, and Aaron Michael Smith.