Jacob Gaboury received his Ph.D. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and
his MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. His research interests include digital media, visual
culture, queer theory, media archaeology, art and technology, media theory, and the history of
computing.
His research focuses on the history and critical theory of digital media, tracing the early origins of
contemporary technologies to identify the cultural, technical, and aesthetic conditions that structure them.
His current book project, titled “Image Objects,” offers a media archaeology of early computer graphics
and visualization in the 1960s and 70s, with a focus on the critical but neglected history of the University
of Utah’s computer graphics program. Following an object oriented approach grounded in original archival
research, the project offers a critique of the supposed immateriality of simulated images through an
investigation of the cultural and technical objects that structured visual computing at this early stage.
Ultimately the project argues that it is through graphics that computing transforms from a tool for
mathematical calculation into a complex interactive medium, and that this legacy continues to shape the
ways we use and understand almost all contemporary visual media.
He has also begun work on a second project, which offers a queer theory of computing viewed through a
set of foundational figures in the history of computation and mathematics. Tentatively titled “On
Uncomputable Numbers,” the project draws on the long history of queer engagements with the antisocial, the negative, and the outside, this project identifies the queer externalities of technical systems in
their break down and failure, and in theories of uncomputability first articulated by Alan Turing in the
1930s. The project is structured around a set of five queer figures in the early history of computer
science, each of whom made foundational contributions to the discipline but whose sexuality has been
largely neglected by historians of technology.