Andrew Lison, Assistant Professor, Media Study and 2019-20 Humanities Institute Faculty Fellow. Photographer: Douglas Levere

Join us at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for our ninth year of Faculty Fellows talks! This lecture series brings current UB humanities research out into the community – with complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres. Free and open to the public.

The late 1980s and early 1990s mark a transition away from a binary, Cold War geopolitics and toward the binary-based, digital media beginning to connect the planet. Initially welcomed, this shift has recently been viewed with skepticism against the backdrop of crises in the liberal-democratic order ranging from the fracturing of the European Union to debates over online speech. Revisiting artifacts from this political and technological turn, however—the software, hardware, and cultural products of the multimedia era—can help distinguish the beneficial, even utopian, aspects of the present-day information revolution from its negative outcomes.

Andrew is Assistant Professor of Media Study where he researches the theory and history of digital media. A former information technology professional, his research focuses on the confluence of technology, political economy, and culture from the mid-20th-century invention of discrete, electronic computation to the present. He is most recently co-author of Archives, and is currently working on a monograph, New Media at the End of History. He has also begun work on a project considering the material limits of computing.