ELLA KLIK
media theory, visual history, space and futurity researcher
research.
I am currently working on Imagining Data Future: Fron DNA to Outer Space, a project that explores the future of data storage. More specifically, the research focuses on technosocial imaginaries — in the form of narratives, fictions, assumptions, and myths — that engineers, scientists, reporters, and entrepreneurs draw on and produce around data storage ventures. This multi-stage work investigates the emergence and social framing of alternatives spawned by rising costs and the detrimental impacts of cloud storage here on Earth.
Where will information go if not inside the massive metal and concrete structures of data centers? My interest is in entrepreneurial ventures racing to replace “the cloud” and overcome its monetary, environmental, and material limitations in four ways: 1.) by launching data into orbit; 2.) by relocating it to the depths of the ocean; 3.) by translating it into DNA code; and 4.) by distributing it among a network of computers. In short, the future of data storage is reimagined as fundamentally spatial — moving above and below, as well as contracting inwards and expanding outwards.
book.
Undoings: Erasure and Negative Media Theory (forthcoming)
Undoings is a book project that zeroes in on the tension between designing technologies that record and retain information on the one hand and the material and economic conditions that introduce erasure on the other hand. The project offers a historical and theoretical account of practices of erasing records from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. It engages with phonograph cylinders, early cinema, magnetic recording, typewriters, and digital media. Each chapter traces the prevailing logic of “designed ephemerality” that guides the production and marketing of new technologies to users.
Ultimately, media are—despite our better efforts to forget—material things. What comprises any type of recording substrate, from celluloid film reels to various components in the cloud's massive server farms, is finite. Storage space and storage capacity are accordingly limited. This investigation of innovation, bookending the long twentieth century, reveals a media economy that relies, to this day, on negation through discard, reuse, and editing. This is true of analog recording systems and even more so in the digital age, entails a balancing act between archiving and disappearing.
teaching.
Theories of the Gaze and Non-human Vision // 2023 // Bar-Ilan
about.
Hi there,
I am a lecturer/assistant professor in the Hermeneutics & Culture Program at Bar-Ilan University.
My research interests are interdisciplinary and range from histories of recording and storage technologies to media theory, futurity, and digitality. I specialize in exploring the intersection of materiality, aesthetics, and history, studying diverse media objects that retain and shape our records of the past. Recently, I've been particularly interested in teaching and researching the mediation of outer space, a part of which I have also received the Azrieli early faculty fellowship.
In the past, I have held research positions in various academic institutions, including the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Cinema and Media Studies at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, The Polonsky Academy at Van Leer Institute, Interactive Media Arts at New York University Shanghai, and the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. I earned my Ph.D. from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.
contact email: ella[dot]klik[at]biu[dot]ac[dot[il]