Several interrelated interests organize my research on visual cultures. My focus on the politics of communication technologies initially emphasized virtual reality (VR) and also includes other non-immersive information technologies. I’m also interested in electronically mediated communication, the histories of visual, optical, and electronic communication technologies, and the technologies of politics and the public sphere. My interest in these technologies parallels and complements my interest in how the ongoing rearticulation of space, identities, and human bodies influences new formulations of minority body politics, their online performances as identity claims and contributes to the irony of their potential disincorporation. My interests in spatial technologies, spatial and visual metaphors, iconographics, and “picture languages” relate directly to what we mean by visual culture. I’m also interested in the iconographic modes of address developed within the cycle of films known as film noir.

While my work on VR stresses the philosophies and political and cultural assumptions built into these machines, my current research looks at the ways by which individuals use more readily available technologies such as the web. My next book, Rituals of Transmission, examines how age old understandings of ritual communication as the vehicle by which people come together to produce meaning is increasingly subject to conflation with a competing definition of communication as the transmission of messages between individuals across space. The transmission of information itself, I argue, is now a principal ritual activity. Areas of inquiry here include the possibilities of telefetishism; the ways that avatar-driven graphical chat environments update yet complicate the modern novel’s use of free indirect discourse or “middle voice”; the ways by which current media practices work to deepen the involvement of viewers/users by seeming to draw them “backstage” and thereby more centrally into the preferred meanings or readings of media producers (think Reality T.V.); and the ways by which a site such as eBay suggests that authenticity is rendered more meaningful and memory and perception confirmed through complex processes of commodification and e-commerce.

Academic Background

I received my Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. My dissertation, Geography, Identity and Embodiment in Virtual Reality, looked at Information Technologies (IT), new media, and more specifically at VR. I argued the importance of distinguishing the technologies that collectively constitute the “platform” that individuals rely on to “enter” virtual environments from these environments or “worlds” in and of themselves.

In writing the dissertation I rekindled a long-standing interest in the meaning of information, theories of information, and the complex set of relationships between representations and that to which representations refer. I'm neither a strict empiricist nor a strict social constructionist. My work most often is organized at the level of personal experience of the world and how this experience articulates to the production of social and political meanings and actions. While I do agree with the broad critique within postmodern argument that meaning is always contestable and reformulating, as a critical post-phenomenologist I also hold that there is a real material world that precedes our attempts to give it meaning. My training in Environmental Studies—the interdisciplinary arena in which I obtained my Masters in Planning—contributes towards this respect for the non-human components of the lived world we inhabit.

If you're reading these words, you’ll realize that I recognize the impossibility of understanding the world without recourse to language and communication. As a Professor of Communication Studies with an emphasis on the History, Theory and Criticism of New Media Technologies, and trained as a Human Geographer, I remain interested in the relationships between communication and the existential ground–including the material space–upon which communicatory practices must “take place.”

M.E.S. (Planning)

In 1991, I received my Masters in Planning from the Environmental Studies Faculty at York University, Toronto, Canada. Building the Image/Nation: Television, Architecture, Edification, and Becoming Places looks at the relationships among visual communications technologies and urban built forms, and proposes that planning is conceptually tied to the notion of “event,” whereas the programming of television, for example, adheres more closely to the indeterminate processes and flow that also increasingly constitute modern urban experiences of the surrounding built form.