Henry Neim Osman

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where I am also completing a certificate in Science and Technology Studies (STS). I work between history of science, philosophy of technology, hardware studies, and media theory.

My dissertation, "Analog Immediacy: Computation and Critique at the Ends of the Digital," historicizes the resurgence of analog and hybrid computer architectures with a concomitant critique of the politics of analogy, from early models of the brain to contemporary neural nets.   I develop the titular analog immediacy as a theory of mediation for analog computing and AI. Analog computers compute with continuously variable physical signals instead of formal programming languages or software. What this means is that language itself, as a site of mediation and of politics, is claimed to disappear, pressuring the central tenets of digital media theory and software studies that rely on structuralist theories of language. My dissertation moves between analog immediacy as a technical phenomenon, the aforementioned turn away from code, and as a social one, in which the biological analogies from neural nets to computer brains and AI biology naturalize AI.

I also have an ongoing critical interest in environmental media and the environmental humanities. My second project, tentatively titled "Vital Informatics," examines the development of living computers made of biological matter rather than silicon. Operating between ecocriticism and history of biology, this project takes up the capture of entanglement and biological networks by new biotechnical systems. Part of this project on plant-based explosive sensors has been published in Digital War. 

I have previous training in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis (BA) and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London (MA).

I am based in Brooklyn, NY and Providence, RI. Please contact me at henry_osman@brown.edu.