Overview
Jeffrey West Kirkwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where his research concentrates on media theory, cultural techniques, and theories and histories of “the digital.” He received his PhD from Princeton University and an MA from the University of Chicago, and he has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Harold W. Dodds Fellowship, and fellowships at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM). In 2018 he co-edited and co-wrote the introduction to the first English translation of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, and his writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (ZMK), OSMOS, and a number of edited collections, among other places. His first book is entitled Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 and he is completing a second book, The Negative Image: A History of Impossible States.
Research Focus
The Future Was Bright: A History of Optical Technologies and Impossible Futures
The proposed research will examine historical cases in which optical technologies designed for scientific observation have fabricated an empirical imaginary. Focusing largely on physicist and psychologist Ernst Mach’s photographs of shock waves and his writings on “thought experiments” [Gedankenexperimente], this project will investigate how the operations of image technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped to create a visual language for articulating states that could not be observed. Against the tendency to view each new generation of media technologies as a movement towards greater verisimilitude and realism, the research engages with how mechanical imaging technologies, such as stroboscopic photography, governed the limitations and possibilities for imagining scientific realities that could never be. By contending with transformations in the technical and conceptual production of possible and impossible states, the proposed book will also shed light on a history of image practices that opened the door to more recent and dubious claims about “alternative facts.” Where technical images have traditionally been praised for establishing the hard contours of what is real and objective, the book reveals a history of technological and philosophical practice that blurred those lines.
My work will be dedicated to researching and writing my second single-authored book project. Tentatively titled The Negative Image: A Media History of Impossible States, the book interrogates the concept of positivism as a productive straw man for philosophers, cultural theorists, and the avant-garde after 1900. The book will historically and theoretically recast the legacy of positivism as vital to the twentieth century “crisis of signification,” as well as the contemporary culture of images. It will thus recover a crucial battle over the political, scientific, and artistic interpretation of images from mechanical modes of inscription through high-resolution digital imaging.