ELLA KLIK
media theory, visual history, space and futurity researcher
book.
In a world inundated by an endless proliferation of texts, images, and data, the tension between the human desire to preserve and the economic incentive to retain collides with the finite nature of storage and its attendant costs. The impulse to keep everything inevitably confronts material constraints, compelling a reckoning with erasure as a necessity that enables ongoing creation. As this book reveals, such considerations are far from unique to the digital age.
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COMING OUT FEBRUARY 2026
research.
Imagining Data Futures: From DNA to Outer Space
I am currently working on a project that explores the future of data storage. 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; 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.
teaching.
Theories of the Gaze and Non-human Vision // 2023
about.
Hi there,
I am a lecturer/assistant professor in the Hermeneutics & Cultural Studies graduate 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, my teaching and research have focused on the mediation of outer space as part of a research project funded by the Azrieli Foundation.
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]