// Selected Written Works
Masters Thesis (First Degree Honors and High Distinction): Alternative Data Governance Models and Data Materialities in the Margins
The “hegemonic data governance model,” whereby a few corporations control much of the Web’s behavioral data, has drawn ire for the inequalities it imposesand mediates (Carballa Smichowski, 2019; Couldry & Mejias, 2019; Zuboff, 2015). In response, experts have proposed innumerable top-down solutions from restructuring the Web into personal data stores, to activating powerful anti-trust laws to break up big tech (Hardjono & Pentland, 2019; Sokol & Comerford, 2016). My masters thesis contends that the deeply context-specific nature of the data architectures and policies that together constitute data governance necessitate analysis from a bottom-up approach instead. Using hermeneutic interview methods, this project engaged organizers of Alternative Data Governance Models (ADGMs) to study the modes of resistance against the monopolization of data as social phenomena, rather than of technical and legal artifacts.
Robot Blood and Gerbil Provoked Dislocations: Boundaries of the Subject and the Digital in Contemporary Media
In my senior thesis, I situate the works of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, the MIT Machine Architecture Group, and theory by David Joselit within the cultural and media theory of the internet. I focus on the intersection of global internet media and politics, operationalizing David Joselit’s notion of “the format”. My arguments center around the relationships of state and civil violence mediated through artworks that are at once digital and physical, cultural and political.
Différance and the Digital: Marc Quinn’s Pixel Tapestries
Pixels in screens and threads in textiles are often compared for their similar methods of creating of images from binary structures, but what of their semiotic relationship or their relationship to the format in which they are expressed? This graduate seminar paper explores an application of Derrida’s notion of Différance and Violence in Language to the ecosystem, infrastructures, and inner workings of digital images. Could the relationship between a pixel and an image be the source of jadedness to international violence in news media?
The Mystery and Melancholy Between the Streets: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the Imaginary Geographies of Paris
How and where does art surface the underlying currents of our culture? How do these cultural currents flow through our urban spaces across time? In this graduate seminar paper, I delve into Walter Benjamin’s kaleidoscopic Arcades Project and articulations of urbanism, cultural, and economic flows in works of fine art.
The Divide: The Index in Postwar California
Written for Professor Carol Armstrong’s graduate seminar in media specificity, this paper explores the transfer of information between sensory experiences and architecture through an analysis of Larry Sultan’s Pictures from Home. I set Sultan’s intensely personal series against the backdrop of Frederic Jameson’s analysis of post-modern hyperspace in the architecture of postwar Los Angeles and Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.