Kyle Stine
Senior Lecturer in Film and Media Studies
Johns Hopkins University
Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time
Essays on Hardwired Temporalities
Edited by Axel Volmar and Kyle Stine
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Available in hardcover.
Open Access PDF.
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
Available in hardcover.
Open Access PDF.
A Critical Hardware Approach to Digital Media
My research takes a critical hardware perspective on the material flows, labor processes, and environmental impacts of new media, while engaging with the complex material histories of cinema, sound media, and computers. In a somewhat counterintuitive move, I argue that any understanding of materiality today must be supplemented by an equally rich and nuanced understanding of the image, that imaging and computing are two aspects of a single system, and that cinema studies still has much to offer new media and software studies.
I am currently working on two interrelated book projects, provisionally titled Integrated Circuits: A Media Theory and Cinematic Fields: Visions of the Nonhuman World, the core arguments for which can be found in my articles “The Coupling of Cinematics and Kinematics” (Grey Room, 2014) and “Critical Hardware: The Circuit of Image and Data” (Critical Inquiry, 2019), for the circuits book; and “Other Ends of Cinema” (JCMS, 2020) and “Nonhuman Cinema and the Logistical Sublime” (October 2021), for the nonhuman cinema book.
My work relies on archival materials, the sifting and sorting through which has been one of my greatest pleasures as a scholar. Beyond several university and city libraries, I have conducted research at the Smithsonian Archive Center, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, the MIT Museum, the Kodak Historical Collection, the Computer History Museum, and the Library of Congress.
I am currently working on two interrelated book projects, provisionally titled Integrated Circuits: A Media Theory and Cinematic Fields: Visions of the Nonhuman World, the core arguments for which can be found in my articles “The Coupling of Cinematics and Kinematics” (Grey Room, 2014) and “Critical Hardware: The Circuit of Image and Data” (Critical Inquiry, 2019), for the circuits book; and “Other Ends of Cinema” (JCMS, 2020) and “Nonhuman Cinema and the Logistical Sublime” (October 2021), for the nonhuman cinema book.
My work relies on archival materials, the sifting and sorting through which has been one of my greatest pleasures as a scholar. Beyond several university and city libraries, I have conducted research at the Smithsonian Archive Center, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, the MIT Museum, the Kodak Historical Collection, the Computer History Museum, and the Library of Congress.
