Norimichi Hirakawa, The Irreversible [4-Dimensional Version] 2016
Biography
Gary Hall is an experimental critical theorist who works at the intersections of digital culture, politics and philosophy. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he is founding director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures which brings together theorists, practitioners, activists and artists. He is also Visiting Researcher in the Centre for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University in the US; and was previously Visiting Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; and Visiting Professor at the Hybrid Publishing Lab – Leuphana Inkubator, Leuphana University, Germany.
His research has been published in Radical Philosophy, New Formations, Media Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, American Literature and Angelaki, and has been translated into Chinese, French, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Spanish and Slovenian. He is the author of a number of books. They include A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). In addition, he is co-author of Open Education: A Study In Disruption (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2006).
He has a history of creating norm-critical collaborative research contexts. In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine which includes among its contributors everyone from Alain Badiou and Bernard Stiegler to N. Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker. In 2006 he co-founded the pioneering open access publishing house Open Humanities Press (OHP), which he still co-directs, and which has published books by Isabelle Stengers, Timothy Morton, Claire Colebrook and many others. He also co-edited OHP's inflential Liquid Books series and the Jisc-funded Living Books About Life series. OHP was a founder member of both the Radical Open Access Collective and ScholarLed, with Hall being co-PI on the associated £3.6 million Research England and Arcadia Trust funded Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project which ran for 3.5 years to May 2023.
He has given lectures and seminars at institutions around the world, including the Australian National University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, University of Heidelberg, K.U. Leuven, Lund University, Monash University, New York University, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, Xi'an Jiaotong Liverpool University in China, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Wellcome Collection in London.
He is currently developing a series of politico-institutional interventions that experiment with digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, contemporary theory, including in relation to the city and public institutions such as the art gallery, the library and the museum.
He is also in the process of publishing two new monographs: Masked Media: What It Means To Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence; and Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal.
Follow him on Mastodon here: @garyhall@hcommons.social