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Steve F. Anderson

Professor
Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, School of the Arts and Architecture

Steve F. Anderson is a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, history, technology and culture. He teaches the production and theory of digital media and documentary in the School of Theater, Film and Television and holds a joint appointment in the department of Design Media Arts.

His book Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images surveys the emergence of computational and photographic image making from the 1830s to the present, focusing on cultural implications related to space, data visualization and surveillance. His previous book, Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past, investigated the emergence of experimental history in visual media including film, television and digital games. With Christie Milliken, he is co-editor of Reclaiming Popular Documentary, which won the award for Best Edited Collection from the Popular Culture Association.

Anderson received a Digital Innovation Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to create Technologies of Cinema, an ongoing work of videographic scholarship that explores the tortured history of computation seen on film and television since 1950. He is also the founder and principal investigator of the public media archive Critical Commons. With Tara McPherson, he co-edited the interdisciplinary electronic journal Vectors and now serves as co-principal investigator for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, developers of the open source electronic publishing platform Scalar

His scholarly work has appeared in the journals Iluminace: The Journal of Film Theory, History, and Aesthetics, [In]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image StudiesAmerican LiteratureCultural Science JournalThe Cine-FilesGAME: The Italian Journal of Game StudiesThe Journal of Media Literacy EducationFrames Cinema JournalVisible LanguageVectorsProfessionPre/TextThe Moving ImageRelease PrintThe IndependentFilmmakerRes MagazineIntelligent AgentFilm Quarterly and Digital Humanities Quarterly, and is anthologized in the books Science Fiction Against the MarginsTransmedia Frictions: The Digital, the Arts, and the HumanitiesF Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s UndoingTelevision Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media AgeDigital Youth, Innovation and the UnexpectedDebating New Approaches to History; New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory ReaderReclaiming Popular Documentary, and The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities.

At UCLA, Anderson has served as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the School of the Arts & Architecture, Chair of the faculty in the School of Theater, Film & Television, Interim Chair of the Department of Film, Television & Digital Media, and Vice Chair of Undergraduate Studies. Previously, Anderson taught for 15 years in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he was the founding director of the practice-based Ph.D. program in Media Arts + Practice (iMap) and a faculty member in the division of Interactive Media & Games.

A former documentary film and sound editor in Washington, D.C., Anderson worked for National Geographic, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Audubon Society, Guggenheim Productions, NHK Broadcasting and ABC Television. He served for more than a decade as a board member of Los Angeles Filmforum and as co-curator with Holly Willis of the experimental digital screening series Blur + Sharpen.

His work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Adobe Systems, Oculus VR/Meta, Samsung, Ricoh, AMD, Related Content Database, Google Daydream and UCLA’s Racial and Social Justice seed grant program.

Anderson’s creative work mobilizes a deliberately transient array of media and technology positioned at the intersection of data and images, incorporating documentary, computational and immersive media. His project Live-VR Corridor received the award for Best Mixed Reality at the New Media Film Festival and was featured in the Beijing International Film Festival in 2021. His feature length video essay Reality Frictions (2024) premiered at the Madrid International Film Festival and received an Award of Merit from the Impact Docs Awards.

Books

Technologies of Vision (2017) MIT Press
Technologies of History (2011) University Press of New England
Reclaiming Popular Documentary (2021) Indiana University Press

Videographic Scholarship

Reality Frictions (2024) feature length video essay premiered at Madrid International Film Festival
Envisioning the Interface (2024) published in Iluminace: The Journal of Film Theory, History, and Aesthetics
Screening Surveillance (2017) published in InTransition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Studies

Articles/Chapters

“Shadows in the Valley: The In/visible Iconography and Toxic Legacy of Computation” in Science Fiction Against the Margins, (University of Washington Press 2024).
“Allegories of Streaming: Image Synthesis and/as Remix” in The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (Routledge 2021).
New (Old) Ontologies of Documentary in Reclaiming Popular Documentary (Indiana University Press 2021

Education

PhD, Film, Literature and Culture, USC

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