Professor Joanna Zylinska

Joanna Zylinska joined King's in 2021 from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she worked for many years as Professor of New Media and Communications. She’s held visiting positions as Guest Professor at Shandong University in China, as Winton Chair Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota, US, and as Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar at McGill University in Canada.

Joanna is the author of eight books on philosophy, technology and art. The primary concern of her work is the constitution of the human as both a species and a historical subject. Adopting the geological probe of ‘deep time’, she has looked at the emergence of the human in conjunction with technologies, such as tools and other artefacts as well as communication in its various forms: language, storytelling, ethics, art, and, last but not least, analogue and digital media. The planetary perspective of her work is anchored in the socio-political concerns of the here and now: primarily, the ecological and economic crises, but also the gendering and racialisation of the apocalyptic narratives brought in as responses to those crises.

Joanna combines her philosophical writings with image-based art practice and curatorial work. Currently she is writing a book on human and machine intelligence and perception for MIT Press, while exploring, on a theoretical and practical level, the future of photography in the era of computation.

Visit Joanna’s website: http://www.joannazylinska.net

Research interests and PhD supervision

• artificial intelligence
• human perception and machine vision
• human and nonhuman creativity
• photography and media art
• the planetary crisis and the imaging of the future

Joanna welcomes PhD applications related to the above. She has supervised a number of PhD students to completion, across both theory and practice. Her current and past PhD students have worked on software as a form of writing; the genetic contamination of Mexicanness; vernacular photography; affect and mobile phones; fungi media; geological filmmaking; light at night; nonhuman practices of scientific imaging; the interface in new media art; and narratives of conflict and independence in video games.

Selected publications

• (2022) The Future of Media, co-edited with Goldsmiths Media (Goldsmiths Press with MIT Press)
• (2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (London: Open Humanities Press)
• (2018) The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, includes a photo-film titled Exit Man.
• (2017) Nonhuman Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)
• (2014) Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press)

Teaching

Joanna teaches across different areas of digital culture, with a focus on philosophical approaches and hybrid theory-practice methods.

Expertise and public engagement

Joanna has presented her work at many art and cultural institutions, e.g. Ars Electronica in Linz, CCCBarcelona, Centre Culturel International de Cerisy, Fotomuseum Winterthur, MMOMA in Moscow, Serpentine Galleries in London, SESC Sao Paolo and Transmediale in Berlin. In 2013 she was Artistic Director of Transitio_MX05 'Biomediations': Festival of New Media Art and Video in Mexico City.

Recent interviews:

Eco-Thoughts, an interview with Joanna for literary magazine The Believer conducted by Leslie Carol Roberts.

Interview about nonhuman photography by Andrew Dewdney for The Photographers’ Gallery.

‘We need a new way of seeing the Anthropocene’ by Laura Benítez Valero for Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (available in English, Spanish and Catalan).

Joanna is involved in experimental publishing projects across various media. She is a member of the Radical Open Access Collective and an editor of the MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW book series for Open Humanities Press.