Doctoral student and artist researching digital media and technology using frameworks and methods from queer theory, feminist theory, and the arts.

My research concerns the boundaries of the virtual, the imaginary, and the artificial in networked technology, digital media, and AI. I am particularly interested in how epistemologies and ontologies from technology, such as video games and chatbots, are formed in relation to those from theory and scholarship—and vice versa. An approach to understanding technology that includes media, art, and concepts of the otherworldly as co-productive epistemologies can dampen its seeming inevitability.

I am currently expanding a paper examining makeup tutorials on YouTube and TikTok through a feminist lens of productive paranoia in conversation with the work of Sianne Ngai, and using a responsive framework of “the real” following the work of Eugenie Brinkema, Teri Silvio, and Roland Barthes.

I am also working on a project about the Bell Telephone Co. employee magazine in the 1920s and Bell’s critical role during this period in developing current understandings of connection, communication, and the optimizing of the body.

 

The Figures | Zine presented at the 4S 2025 Seattle Inaugural Zine Festival + Library

THE FIGURES ZINE IS A PART OF MY ONGOING RESEARCH | Imagined bodies are not neutral. In order to respond to the complexities of the real and the abstract in digital media and the history of computer and communication technology, I formed a method of analysis guided by fictional characters with theory-based personalities and aesthetics.

This zine follows three original characters called The Figures: 2V the Animated Chrono-Fairy, The Network Figure, and The Hollow Ghost. My structuring claim is that theorists, scholars, artists, aesthetics, and ideologies live in the mind as individualized variants, like puppets or familiars, each one distinct from the “original” and animated and voiced as needed. This represents the normal processes of analysis and scholarly work. I incentivize this concept by illustrating hybrid theory-beings that represent specific analytical and critical aims, and the creature-making itself drives the central process of this approach. This "queer reproduction" was inspired by Anne Pollock's work on epigenetics and the politics of toxicity and queerness, and is activated through Teri Silvio's framework of animation and study of puppets, Shunsuke Nozawa’s concept of characterization, and Wendy Chun’s work on networks and discriminatory data. The Figures in this zine aim to interrogate the queered dimensions of connection and embodiment in digital media and technology.

Digital artwork by Camille Coy, cutout images are from her collection of vintage comics and science fiction magazines or as cited. 

SCULPTURES FOR THE APPLE VISION PRO | An experiment in relating to art and characters in augmented reality.

The AVP was designed by Apple to optimize productivity and activate hyper-real experiences of images, so can it be nudged outside of its affordances for research and art?

Created during my research for my MeaningfulXR 2025 poster “Imagined Guides: Rendered Bodies, Critical Theory, and Ways of Knowing with XR” exploring the relationships between the virtual and how scholars and artists relate to theory.

In a later presentation at the CITAMS Media Sociology Symposium, I explored the extractive history of augmented and virtual reality devices, beginning with the 19th century stereoscope, as contributing to modern understandings of the “real” and colonial understandings of gender, power, and labor that continue in AR/VR devices today.