ZABET PATTERSON, Assistant Professor, Contemporary Art and Digital Media. Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley.
EMPATTERSON@notes.cc.sunysb.edu
Room 4289 - 631.632.7250

Zabet Patterson specializes in the intersection of contemporary art and computational media in the postwar period. Her work is shaped by psychoanalytic and post-structuralist theory, and her interests include contemporary art history and criticism, digital media history and theory, performance, and cybernetics. She received her PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley in 2007, and completed a prior MA at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, entitled Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image, was supported by fellowships from the Townsend Humanities Center, the Rhetoric Department, and the Josephine de Karman Foundation. Zabet spent 2005-6 as Visiting Assistant Professor in the departments of Art History and Art at Northwestern University. She has been invited to speak at symposia devoted to modern and contemporary art, digital media, visual culture and continental philosophy in Instanbul, London, Florence, Vancouver, Tokyo and across the United States, and has curated exhibitions on sound art and locative media.

Her publications include "Cybernetic Cinema: From the Gun Controller to the Mandala," in Grey Room, "POEMFIELDs and the Materiality of the Computational Screen" in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and "Going Online: Consuming Fantasies in the Digital Era," in Porn Studies, a collection edited by Linda Williams. Forthcoming articles include "The Cybernetic Cinema of John and James Whitney," in Mainframe Computing edited by Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn, "J.G. Ballard and the Pornographic Imaginary," in The Porngraphic Archive, and "Wireless Imagination" in Futurismo. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript entitled Visionary Machines, based on the research conducted for her dissertation.

Zabet is currently Assistant Professor in Art at Stony Brook University, and a core faculty member of the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture, and Technology (cDACT). She holds affiliations with Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and the Art and Philosophy Graduate Program. She teaches courses on topics of art and technology, contemporary digital culture, contemporary art and critical theory.