Intervening in longstanding debates about the impact of the shift from analog to digital technology, this dissertation rethinks an aesthetics of photographic space in light of the information age. I argue that digital technology is transforming the very “nature” of the photographic medium as we know it. Since its invention in the early nineteenth century, the photograph has been widely thought of as a “mirror” or “window.” Critics and scholars have consequently tended to focus on the medium as a tool of realism: it either provides proof of the reality before the camera or serves as a visual record of the past. I demonstrate the photograph’s parallel evolution as a site for constructing novel spatial models for looking at and thinking about the world. I show how the photograph—alternately figured as a grid, a map, a table, or a studio—continually undermines the dominant metaphors of its own transparency.

My central claim is that we are witnessing the definitive breakdown of a worldview built around the fixed mastery of perspective to one that privileges the dynamic proliferation of pattern. To illustrate this trajectory, I juxtapose the work of canonical figures alongside the innovations of current practitioners. The first two chapters outline and complicate the camera’s traditional tie to the conventions of one-point, linear perspective as a “truthful” framing of the world. Reading the photographic interiors of Eugène Atget and John Divola, as well as the “eye exercises” and “perspective games” of Lázló Moholy-Nagy and Elad Lassry, I establish the photograph as a tool for generating what I call “ambiguous space.” The next two chapters elaborate on this new paradigm for picture-making and looking. As the photograph enters the mutable terrain of the digital screen, space is rewritten as information. Tracing this other genealogy of photographic space, I redefine two key terms within photographic discourse: the “index” and the punctum. From the plant taxonomies of Karl Blossfeldt to the mimicry of the screen’s entropic logic and the “retouching” of physical and virtual space by artists Michele Abeles, Katja Novitskova, Sara Cwynar, and others—I reveal how crucial perspectival cues such as depth, scale, and a vanishing point infinity are being overturned. I address the effects of this loss of perspectival orientation for how we imagine ourselves as locatable subjects in the world. I discover this other “nature” of the photograph as a richly ambiguous and synthetic space—rather than one that is self-evident and realist—in order to illuminate the ways that photographic practices are reinventing the limits and conditions of how we perceive and organize space, both in the picture and in the world.

This dissertation analyzes the perception of endlessness in digital media from the 1970s to today, a characteristic which I argue is unique to live, networked screens and is deeply imbricated with the rise of platform capitalism. Digital media have frequently been characterized as boundless, as a continual, almost elemental, stream of images and information. From claims of “information overload” in the 1970s, to the cloud metaphors used today, networked media have been understood and experienced as expansive and without limits. This dissertation traces the history of this tendency, focusing on what I term the “infinite aesthetic” of digital media. The infinite aesthetic can be found in the infinite scroll of social media feeds and search results, in the loops of a GIF and the proliferation of a meme, in the auto play function of a streaming platform and the background animations of a video game. These new never-ending moving images accompany the rise of 24/7 networks and the neoliberal workplace, and the yoking of mobile computing with the attention economy. This dissertation traces four major case studies that represent the emergence of infinite images as an emblematic genre of the digital age, and how they relate directly to transformations wrought by post-Fordist capitalism. I argue that the centrality of this aesthetic underpins how the culture of twenty-first century platform capitalism came to be perceived as not only an endless, frictionless flow, but one characterized by exponential growth.This history began in the late 1960s with a little-known experimental video art lab in the Bay Area where artist’s investigations into the new electronic medium of video pioneered the possibilities of an ever-renewing, live image. In this first chapter, “A Counterfeit Infinity: Video Art and Real-Time Aesthetics,” I show how these innovations in the aesthetics of the live video feed were key to the transformation of computers from calculating machines into interactive visual media devices. In the second chapter, “Without Limits: the Animated Screensaver and 24/7 Computing,” I trace the development of the infinite aesthetic to a new genre of moving images - the animated screensaver - which I argue played a central role in the shift to “always on” computing. I analyze how the screensaver’s infinite aesthetic becomes aligned with neoliberal notions of productivity by supporting the practice of leaving the personal computer on at all times. The third chapter, “Without End: The Infinite Scroll and Platform Capitalism,” turns to the history of the “infinite scroll,” which has its roots in the nineteenth-century stock ticker – a historical connection that underscores the imbrication of live, continually unfolding media and the temporal demands of late capitalism. Finally, “Cryptic Futures: The Endless Deferrals of Web3” examines the recent emergence of crypto art and NFT trading as emblematic of the intensification of speculation and the normalization of indebtedness under post-Fordist capitalism. To the endless work time and endless attention mining of the last thirty years of internet culture, we can now add the endless deferral of the future that arises from the perpetual states of indebtedness that fuel finance capitalism.

“Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” examines silent film through the prisms of criminality and capitalism, analyzing the ways in which the emerging institutions of modern policing and motion pictures corroborated and subverted each other’s projects from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. I focus on silent films that register the imbrication of modern policing and moving pictures as they were consolidated into dominant social institutions with increasingly standardized practices. Over the course of the dissertation, I show that policing is not simply thematized in silent film, but structures its form and mode of perception. Modern policing does not simply employ the technology of modern image-making; rather, photography and silent film shape the protocols of modern policing and disseminate its worldview. My dissertation argues that policing racially marked bodies, surveying urban vice, and containing women’s mobility offered strategies and material for both institutions to obtain legitimacy, expand power, and train audiences/subjects in the emerging relationship between optics and power in the public sphere. At times, these practices created conditions for institutional critique of the police and the cinema, as well as the broader capitalist system in which both were embedded.By connecting criminality, the capitalist mode of production, and the consolidation of the institutions of modern policing and cinema, I develop a methodology that prioritizes the consequences of capitalist modernity from the point of view of its victims; the capacity of film, as a technological commodity itself, to reflect on its emplacement in expanding industrial capitalism; and the distinct potential of silent film, as a global mass medium, to engage the critical possibilities of the universal. I put silent films in constellation with archival intertexts that illuminate the discursive regimes in which the films intervened and contemporary moving image media. In this way, “Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives” brings together methods from media archaeology, critical theory, and black studies to contribute to a “genealogy of our present”—a present marked by the circulation of digital media that document police abuse of power, as well as collective resistance to state-sanctioned violence.

Media/Fetish analyzes the history of media technologies in anglophone West Africa with a special emphasis on Ghana from the early twentieth century to the present. Each chapter examines representations of a different media technology—gramophones, cinema, television, and mobile phones—at the time when they were new. Through an engagement with African studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial studies, Media/Fetish addresses a recurring deficiency in the history and theory of new media. By reorienting the emphasis from historical moments of invention, which tacitly privilege Euro-American ontologies of new media, to the analysis of the meanings of media technologies once they are adopted and adapted, Media/Fetish shows how the world is structured by new media use in Accra as much as it is by new media design in Silicon Valley. I argue that media have, in part, been made “new” by their discursive relationship to racialized development narratives. Be it the colonial civilizing mission to bring Western knowledge to Africans through mobile cinema or the promise of black uplift through the formation of Ghana’s national television, race has been crucial to global theories of new media.

“Touchscreen Media: The Touch and User-Spectators in Twenty-First Century China” examines the global dissemination of touchscreen media and their radical transformation of our dynamic interactions with media objects. Through the lens of everyday media practices in contemporary China, this dissertation investigates changes in media and sensory perception caused by the touchscreen as a new viewing technology and platform. This dissertation theorizes the emergence of the touchscreen and its mobilization of touch by examining three hand gestures: scrolling/swiping, pinching-spreading, and bullet-titling/typing. The emphasis on hand movements offers a corrective to the ocular-centric conception of the screen as an optical apparatus dominating the studies of modern western visual cultures. This dissertation also proposes a reconceptualization of the spectator as the user-spectator, a subject who comes into being in their coevolution with media devices enhanced by touch technology. This reconceptualization thus addresses the “embodied” spectator as a technological subject who reshapes and is reshaped by digital tactility, departing from phenomenological approaches that, though claiming to recuperate other suppressed senses, reduce embodiment to “embodied vision,” in which the sense of touch is approached through the model of synaesthesia. This dissertation responds to the urgent need to adapt theories of media apparatus and spectatorship to new technologies and practices of kinesthetic communication.

This dissertation reframes color as an experiential category that is consistently manipulated and calibrated through technological means, often to the benefit of corporate institutions and global structures of power. “Seeing by Numbers” is organized around what I call “the digitization of perception”: an epistemological mode that equates numbers and measurement with knowledge that emerged in the early twentieth century. I argue that color systems (diagrams or models that organize the color spectrum in visual and spatial terms) emblematize the tension between quantified norms and embodied experience that characterizes much of postindustrial culture. Analyzing examples ranging from nineteenth-century commercial paint charts to the postwar suburban home to Pantone’s Color of the Year and Adobe Photoshop, I reveal how modern color models, which were adapted for industry standards in fields ranging from agriculture to computer interfaces, continue to inform how we use and experience color today. In this way, the project charts a narrative of continuity rather than rupture when it comes to digital and algorithmic technology and contends that qualities commonly linked to digital color—such as numerical representation, modularity, and detachment from form—map onto a way of seeing that has been with us since long before computational technology.

In chapter one, my engagement with turn-of-the-century developments in synthetic dyes and the emerging fields of psychophysics and spectroscopy reveals that the color grid overtook the color wheel as the primary organizational mode beginning in the early twentieth century. Grid configurations such as the Standard Color Card of America taught citizens to see colors as discrete entities that were abstracted from objects, reshaping human perception and patterns of consumption in a rapidly industrializing world. The next chapter moves to the American postwar suburban home. Reading the writings of famed color consultant Faber Birren alongside mid-century color psychology and advertising theory, I contend that the so-called freedom of color choice within the home promoted by color consulting firms and paint companies actually cemented set identity categories, as gender and race became subject to standardization and classification under the guise of personality. I then turn to the period between the 1980s and early 2000s, when color standards initially designed for pigments were adapted for light-emitting digital screens. From social media accounts to installation works, users and artists alike understand digital color as modular and choppy rather than seamless, drawing inspiration from the material aspects of the computer supposedly obfuscated by the screen. The final chapter consists of two central case studies—the Color Factory, an interactive pop-up Instagram exhibition, and Pantone’s Color of the Year—demonstrating how color today cannot be separated from the rise of an attention-based platform economy grounded in voluntary self-surveillance and the commodification of emotions. By capitalizing on the notion that color is nostalgic or “authentic,” both these examples promote color as an escape from the “always-on” mindset of a technologically saturated existence, despite the irony that they depend on this very framework to survive. Ultimately, by taking a critical stance on color systems and diagrams that purport to be objective, I draw attention to the ways in which changing representational strategies continue to play a key role in establishing ways of knowing and constructing both the self and the world around us.

The birth of modernist art in South America is largely attributed to the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres-García. Born in Montevideo, Torres-García spent forty years living abroad in Europe and the United States, before returning home. Because his life was divided between Europe and the Americas, his artwork and legacy are discussed as exemplars of art as mestizaje, but to label him thusly performs an erasure of both the Indigenous influence on his aesthetic and his commitment to establish a truly Latin American art. His homecoming was not heralded by a desire to impose an imperialist aesthetic on Uruguay but inspired him to establish an autochthonous art, first through the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935-39) and then through the Taller Torres-García (1942-62), which outlived him by over a decade.

In this dissertation, I interpret both his artwork and his literature as philosophical texts, as such, I examine the Indoamerican roots in his thinking and art practice and seek to reorient the assumed direction of influence on South American modernism away from Europe and back to American soil. I then place Torres-García and his body of work within the Chickasaw academic, Jodi Byrd’s, theory of cacophony. If one of the failures of postcolonial theory is that it flattens relations into a binary, cacophony, a concept Byrd builds from the Chickasaw-Choctaw notion of haksuba, seeks to nuance this. Reading Torres-García within this framework, I argue, allows me to simultaneously critique him and his indigenismo ideology, while also analyzing his Indigenous modernism and its attempt to create community within and across the Americas.