Academia

Zachary Horton is an Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. His research explores scale as media at the intersections of media archaeology, literature, science studies, and the environmental humanities. At Pitt he founded and directs the Vibrant Media Lab. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his MFA in Film Directing from the American Film Institute Conservatory. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of California, San Diego with double majors in Media Arts and Philosophy.

Curriculum Vitae (abridged)

PUBLICATIONS

Book: The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation. Chicago University Press. September 2021.

“Viral Zoom: COVID-19 as Multi-Scalar Immune Failure” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. 16:3, 319-340 (December 14, 2020)

“A ‘Total Play and Learning Experience’: The Magnavox Odyssey’s 1972 Dream of Media Convergence” Continent. 8, no. 1 (September 17, 2019): 76-86–86.

“Written on the Sky: Inscription, Scale, and Agency in Anthropocenic Semiotics” Literary Geographies. Volume 5, No. 1. 2019. 54-71

“Toward a Particulate Politics: Visibility and Scale in a Time of Slow Violence” Electronic Book Review, December 1, 2019.

“The Trans-Scalar Challenge of Ecology” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Volume 26.1

“The Guattarian Art of Failure” in Ecosophical Aesthetics. Edited by Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner. Bloomsbury Press. 2018.

“Going Rogue or Becoming Salmon?: Geoengineering Narratives in Haida Gwaii” Cultural Critique. (Fall 2017)

“Composing a Cosmic View: Three Alternatives for Thinking Scale in the Anthropocene” in Size and Scale in Literature and Culture. Edited by Michael Travel Clarke and David Wittenberg. (December 2017)

“Ant and Empire: Mediating Trans-Scalar Territoriality and the Problem of Reciprocal Becomings” in Deleuze and the Animal. Edited by Patricia MacCormack and Colin Gardner. Edinburgh University Press. (2017)

“Toward a Speculative Nano-Ecology: Trans-Scalar Knowledge, Disciplinary Boundaries, and Ecology’s Posthuman Horizon” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Volume 2, Number 3. 2016.

“Creative Accounting in Hollywood: Faulkner’s Transmedial Ledger” in Picturing Faulkner: The Visual World of William Faulkner. (book under review)

“Collapsing Scale: Nanotechnology and Geoengineering as Speculative Media” in Shaping Emerging Technologies: Governance, Innovation, Discourse. Edited by Kornelia Konrad, Christopher Coenen, Anne Dijkstra, Colin Milburn and Harro van Lente, IOS Press / AKA, Berlin, 2013.

“Can You Starve a Body Without Organs? The Hunger Artists of Franz Kafka and Steve McQueen” Deleuze Studies, Volume 6.1. February 2012. University of Edinburgh Press

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT

ENGLIT/ENGFLM 0812: Media/Ecology
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The term “media ecology” captures both a new, nonlinear systems approach to understanding media itself as well as the intersection between natural ecosystems and technological networks. This course will explore both media that interface with natural ecosystems and works that engage contemporary media systems at different scales. The secret life of information, contagious media, and the post-natural ecologies of our present and future will challenge us to conceive of Media and Ecology as a single coupled system: the emblem of our contemporary environment. We’ll study film, literature, games, and other media in this interdisciplinary course.

Film Studies 1002: Game, Story, Play

This game studies course will explore the role of play in narrative and the role of narrative in play. We will engage in longform play and analysis of just one game per week, diving deep into its form, narrative, potentials for interface and interaction, branching storylines, intertextual resonances with other genres, forms of media, and literature, and the game’s relationship with historical and/or contemporary cultural narratives. How do games produce narratives differently than other forms of media? Can games be literary? What are some of the emergent relationships between play and the social? Can games help you gain new perspectives on your culture? Other people? Yourself? We’ll analyze narrative-rich video games, real-time social games, and narrative-building board games. No particular gaming experience or skill is required or expected, but you will need to invest significant out-of-classroom time each week to learning and playing games. Class sessions will be devoted to class discussions of the games and theoretical readings, and sometimes to further in-class play. Guest appearances by celebrated game designers are a regular feature of this class.

Film Studies 2493: Media/Ecology (Graduate Seminar)

From the late twentieth century to the present, ecology as a scientific discipline and set of cultural narratives has risen to the forefront of knowledge production as a way to study and understand complex biological systems, their environments, and their internal dynamics. During the same period, media systems have grown exponentially in complexity until they too have begun to exhibit some of the behaviors of ecological systems, including self-organization, feedback, evolution, and emergent properties. This seminar will explore both media that interface with natural ecosystems as well as works and theory that approach mediation from an ecological and systems theoretical perspective. The secret life of information, contagious media, and the post-natural ecologies of our present and future will challenge us to conceive of Media and Ecology as a single coupled system: the emblem of our contemporary environment and an important frontier in media studies of the present.

English/Film 0712: Critical Making

Why do we, as a culture, make things? What are the narratives and politics that inform our making? What social relationships are embodied in object relationships? How might an engagement with material culture change the way we relate to others, or to ourselves? Conversely, how might engaging narratives of making change the ways we think about making things? In this course we will examine the history and stories of the “maker movement” that is in the process of rapidly changing the place of making in our culture. We’ll consider both utopian and dystopian forms of making. The aim of this course is to “close the circuit” between creative conceptual production, social networking, and materialized object relationships.

English 1355 / FMST 1765: Virtual Reality

From the dawn of human society, no topic has been more fiercely debated than the nature of reality. In narrative, philosophy, and media, virtual reality has always been with us. This course dives deep into the rabbit hole of the real and the virtual, an adventure that includes philosophy, literature, film, and, of course, VR headsets aplenty! In addition to exploring the history of the real and the virtual, this course considers the relationship of virtual reality to the body, to space, to human gesture and communication, and to code. It also explores the role of the imagination and creativity in the generation of new worlds.

English 0512: Post Digital Gaming

This course examines the narrative, social, and material dynamics of games that have emerged within the era of ubiquitous digital media, yet employ analog elements as either a rejection of the digital, a critical response to it, or an exploration of the hybrid potentials of analog-digital systems. This is partly to explore the reasons why the current moment is often referred to as the “golden age of tabletop games” (otherwise known as “board games”), marked by significant innovation in the form, an explosion of tabletop game popularity, and a significant online culture devoted to this most offline of media. How do these games frame the relationship between the analog and the digital, the body and code, open systems and closed worlds? In the course of this adventure through narrative, emergent social dynamics, and simulated worlds, we play innovative tabletop games from recent years, some older games that have been remediated in various ways, early video games, and recent innovations in hybrid analog-digital games. The course considers how the narrative architectures and gameplay mechanics generated by these games enable emergent storytelling and critical simulation at the same time, reflecting on and probing identity, social space, and ethics in an era of digital media.

English 2020: Scale (Graduate Seminar)

This theory seminar examines the dynamics of scale that underlie many of the crises, discourses, and media practices of the present, including global climate change, big data, networked and viral media, the rise of neo-fascisms, conspiracy theory, and mass surveillance. Can scale theory afford us critical purchase on some or all of these dynamics? Our goal is to scout the frontiers of tomorrow’s critical theory and to forge paths forward. Our implicit assumption is that the humanities have a vital role to play in re-conceiving human culture at both larger and smaller scales.

English 1202: Critical Game Studies

This course examines video games from a cultural, philosophical, and narrative standpoint, through a number of close readings. Games studied range from the entire history of the form.

English 0521: Scan Culture

One way to characterize the intertwined social and technological milieu of the 21st century is as “scan culture.” From the NSA’s wide reaching scanning programs revealed by Edward Snowden to be systematically scanning nearly all of our metadata to Gmail’s scanning of our emails to ubiquitous body scanners at airports to the vast digitization efforts by Amazon, Google, and the Internet Archive to transfer our archives and reading practices into the modalities of the digital, our lives are largely structured by scanning techniques that are simultaneously technological and social. This course examines the intersection of ubiquitous surveillance and mass digitization, including questions of personal and group identity, privacy, online world building, digital media culture, encryption, and scan subversion. Students in 2017 built, as a collaborative class project, a full book scanning platform, currently housed in the Vibrant Media Lab. Students are encouraged to create scanning art or other media projects in this course.

English 1900: Project Seminar: Micro Macro Reading

This project seminar tackles cultural objects from a multi-scalar perspective. How can we adequately analyze something as large as 27 years of The Simpsons? How can we trace large scale change in a cultural form without losing sight of its vitally important minutiae? Are close reading and distant reading compatible? In this course we develop such a multi-scalar reading practice while collectively analyzing the flora and fauna of Emily Dickinson’s entire oeuvre, the full collection of all US presidential nomination speeches (back to Abraham Lincoln), and over 600 episodes of The Simpsons. View examples of student individual and group projects here.