Kris Cohen
Jane Neuberger Goodsell Professor of Art History and Humanities
Art Department
Division of the Arts
Kris Cohen is trained as a media theorist and an art historian. These two fields come together in his work on the technological mediation of social life. His first large scale research project, now complete, takes up this history near the end, with the advent of electronic networks and the building of new collective forms in networked environments. Future projects will extend this history back in time as a way to better understand the present. One will consider the relationship between art practices and changes to the intellectual property laws that govern creative labor and the commons. Another seeks to write a history for the bitmap as a mid-century screen technology that significantly transformed techniques of visual representation. Kris' PhD is in Art History from the University of Chicago (2010). He has written for the journals Afterall, New Media and Society, Continuum, caareviews, and a number of exhibition catalogues. He has also recently been involved in starting a new online journal, Open-Set. At Reed, he's taught "Video, Media, Politics (1968-Present)," "Figuring Relation," "The Art of Capitalism," "Theories of Forms," and Humanities 110.