Rebecca Uliasz

Rebecca Uliasz is a scholar and artist whose work centers on the links between digital media, critical theory, and the history of technology and the human sciences, with an emphasis on environmental issues, and with a commitment to environmental and social justice. Her more recent work looks at how digital technologies like accelerated computing and artificial intelligence (AI) sense the planet, and tracks twenty-first century shifts in how data-intensive media are used to govern how we make sense of anthropogenic climate change and the affective economies of uncertainty, with specific attention to the production of racialized, gendered and class-based subjectivities. Additional ongoing research projects look at the relation between planetary media and enduring forms of colonial and imperial violence, and how media sense and produce climate futures. She maintains a creative practice focused on audio-visual noise performance, installation, and experimental research methodology both individually and as part of the critical computational praxis unit Governance (co-founded with Quran Karriem in 2017).

Her recent publications look at the racializing and gendered logics of AI-generated images, security, and preemption (The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory; 2022), the political economy of smart algorithms and predictive advertising on platforms (Review of Communication; 2021), and the transnational politics of machine learning facial recognition systems in the United States and rural China (AI & Society; 2020). Additional publications and works have appeared in Experimental Practices: Encounters Across Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, transmediale, Studies in Art and Humanities Journal, Journal of Media Art & Science, Moogfest, and A Peer-Reviewed Journal About (APRJA). She received her Ph.D. in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures at Duke University in 2024 and MFA in New Media from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2017.