My current research programme develops what I call vector theory, a theory of how artificial intelligence, organised around learned high-dimensional geometries, reshapes the production of knowledge and the political economy of computation. Within this I work on artificial intelligence through the notions of the manifold and the vector medium, on the political economy of vectors, and on the implications of this shift for the categories of media theory, critical theory, software studies, and the digital humanities.

Computation now penetrates virtually every domain of contemporary life, from arts and humanities practice to political and economic structures. Understanding how algorithms, software, and artificial intelligence systems work is not merely a technical matter but a question of power, knowledge, and critique. My work seeks to provide students with the theoretical and methodological tools, such as political economy, to interrogate these systems, to understand how they are legitimated, and to develop capacities for immanent critique.

I am particularly interested in the possibility of explainability and interpretability as practices of critical reason. Questions about computation are not settled, they re-form with each new architecture and each new system, and require innovative approaches to concept creation and theoretical work. Working with research students to develop critical and theoretical approaches to these questions is central to my approach.

Alongside this, I work on the historical genealogies of artificial intelligence, particularly through the rediscovery of the source code for ELIZA, the first chatbot, which had been lost for over fifty years, this will be published in 2026 as Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI (MIT Press). This work connects historical questions about computation and intelligence to contemporary concerns about bias, transparency, and trust in AI systems. I am also interested in the history and philosophy of the university, examining how universities have become increasingly organised according to instrumental logics drawn from corporate structures, and how we might recover and reinvigorate the idea of the university as a space for critical thought and democratic culture.

Key fields: critical university studies, critical theory, media theory, cultural political economy, digital humanities, software studies, algorithms, critical code studies, critical approaches to artificial intelligence.

PhD SUPERVISION

I am keen to supervise PhD students in the fields of computational media, critical digital humanities, software studies, digital media, philosophy of the university, critical theory, digital humanism, the politics of AI alignment, explainability, and media theory. I am particularly interested in receiving doctoral proposals that combine theoretical and philosophical work with digital studies in innovative ways.

Current doctoral students are studying:

• Computational Capitalism: The Political Economy of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Value Extraction (with Dr BL Roberts)
• Critical Theory and Transformations of Work in the Age of Platforms: Ethical and Political Challenges (with Prof D Schecter)
• Synthetic Mediations: Mapping the Anti-Hermeneutic and Post-Ideological Structure of Automated Communications in the Digital Public Sphere (with Prof D Schecter)
• A Critique of Public Sphere in Chinese Social Media and its relationship with Chinese Mainstream Media and Public Opinion (with Dr Sally Chen)
• Authoritarian Intelligence: The role of AI and big data in enabling political and social control (with Dr T Kant)
• Temporal Enclosures in the Digital Milieu (with Prof KS O'Riordan)

Past doctoral students include:

• Free and Open Hardware: A Critical and Thematic Analysis of Free and Open Hardware Communities RepRap and Arduino (with Dr BL Roberts)
• Distant sonification: A critical computational method for sonic analysis of digital data (with Prof T Magnusson)
• The Network A Priori: Mapping New Ideological Constellations Under Conditions of Computational Capitalism (with Prof D Schecter)