Associate ProfessorChris Chesher

His current research includes:

• My research investigates the historical and contemporary operations, sociotechnics and meanings of digital technologies in everyday life. I am influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, media ecology, actor-network theory, phenomenology, visual culture and theories of movement, space and spatiality. 
• Invocational media: reconceptualising the computer: I continue to work with my concept of invocational media: arguing that what defines computers is not just computation, but also their capacity to mediate invocations. This project draws on myth and magic, the history of computing, and the dynamics of human-computer interaction to re-read digital media as mediators of calls to invocable domains of software, memory, networks, inputs and outputs. Users get the seductive power of invocation (search, gameplay, media streaming, voice assistants) to call up things at will, but this power is conditional on becoming subject to forces outside one’s control. New forms of power have emerged including disciplinary and control society formations, monopolies of invocation (IBM, Microsoft, Google), and the involuntary invocations of government and capitalist surveillance. 
  
  

Selected previous research:

• smart home and smart cities
• police databases and remediations of space (using Deleuze and Guattari)
• the digital dark age: the fragility of computers as time-binding media (using Innis)
• blogs and the reassertion of authorship (Foucault and Barthes)
• actor network analysis of music spectatorship with mobile phones
• using game conventions to negotiate space with satnavs (using Lefebvre)
• the cultural politics of educational software (with Sarah Howard)
• player/screen relations in video games: ’the glaze’ (using Ellis)
• the iPhone in the history of photography (using Guattari)
• the 'network turn’: social networks, network society, actor-networks and social media

Emerging and other research interests:

• brain-machine interfaces
• technologically mediated visual cultures
• artificial intelligence
• games as media and culture