"Factory Forms: Automation and the Making of the Mass Image"
May 21, 2026 | 4:00 PM | Cobb 307
About the Lecture
Photography, cinema, television, and print media are often defined by their technological reproducibility. But for most of their existence, these media have relied not only on automatic processes but also on the skilled manual labor of printers, laboratory technicians, projectionists, and broadcast engineers. In the present moment, when new forms of automation are putting old notions of skill into crisis, how should media historians regard the relationship between human and machine? In this talk, Mal Ahern will present from her forthcoming book, Factory Forms, in which she argues that the history of media technology requires a fuller accounting of the material production of the mass image. Linked to mass production from the start, image reproduction has regularly been subject to capitalist logics of productivity and technological improvement--subject to repeated claims that machine process can fully replace human labor. A closer look at each apparent triumph of automation, however, reveals a history not of labor replacement but displacement. While pursuing a variety of historical examples, this talk will begin by returning to one of media studies’ primal scenes: the concurrent emergence, in the early 19th century, of photographic reproduction, computation, and the automation of textile production. In the gap between abstract form and unruly matter, new forms of labor emerged to compensate for the limitations of machines.
About the Speaker
Mal Ahern is Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Washington. She is a historian of media technology interested in the intersection between media materiality, historical materialism, and aesthetics. Her essays on topics such as air conditioning, print technology, automation, and Andy Warhol in journals such as diacritics, Discourse, and e-flux architecture. Her work has received the Annette Kuhn Essay Award and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship. She is currently a Signature Course Fellow at the University Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and the Common Good, where she developed the course Being Human with Technology (https://humans-and-machines.signature.courses).