Kyle Parry researches across digital media, visual culture, critical theory, and the environmental humanities. His book project, A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes (University of Minnesota Press, ~2022) argues for the power and pervasiveness of a cross-media cultural form called assembly. A second book project, Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes, is a co-edited volume on the history and theory (and critique) of photographic ubiquity, to be published with Leuven University Press in Fall 2021. Other recent projects concern selfies, digital imaging, and thought; protest, networks, and the concept of aboutness; and performative approaches to digital scholarship and data visualization. His research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Archive Journal.

 

ARI Supported Project: A Theory of Assembly joins books like The Attention Economy and The Age of Sharing in placing front and center a single, essential term: assembly. Assembly draws attention to expressive practices that do not characteristically narrate or represent the world but rearrange and reconstitute it. The projects gathered in the book vary from paintings and installations to online archives, internet memes, data visualizations, and more. Analyzing these projects with a distinct method of “plural reading,” the book establishes assembly as a cultural form that has come to equal or even dominate forms like narrative, representation, and performance amid the rise of the digital media.

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