Campus Directory

Division Arts Division

Department/College/Unit History of Art/Visual Culture

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Web Site

Primary Office Location Porter College Academic
D-207

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Wednesdays 3-5pm, via Zoom, or email with your availability

Mail Stop Porter Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

Kyle Parry researches the contemporary visual world. How do artists, activists, and institutions use and understand art and images in relation to technological change? What forms of expression prove most powerful in contexts of racialized and extractive ways of seeing? How do dim and shadowy conditions shape our vision and perception? With a focus on the United States, he is especially interested in forms and concepts that seem secondary: memes, metadata, and darkness.

Parry's new book, Ways of Seeing After Dark (2026), contends that darkness is not absence but presence, shaping how worlds are sensed, inhabited, and understood. Darkness brings peril, but it is also a fundamental, if increasingly threatened, condition of living together on this planet. The book examines how fear of darkness is built rather than universal and how such training intersects with broader social structures, including racism and capitalism.

His first book, also with the University of Minnesota Press, was A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes (2023). Mapping the recent prevalence of assembly as a distinctly relational cultural form, the book has been reviewed in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Visual Studies, International Journal of Commuincation, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, and FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies. 

Parry coedited Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes (2021), a book of new essays on the history and theory (and critique) of photographic ubiquity. His essay "Metadata Is Not Data About Data" has been used by media theorists, scholars of information, and practitioners. His research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Archive Journal.

Summary of Expertise

art, digital media, and visual culture; data, technology, and environment; critical theory; history and theory of photography

Teaching Interests

HAVC 49: From Memes to Metadata: An Introduction to Digital Visual Culture

HAVC 141H: Media History and Theory

HAVC 141L: Museums in the Internet Era

HAVC 141N: Data Cultures: Art, Technology, and Politics of Visual Representation

HAVC 141P: Networks and Natures: Art, Technology, and the Nonhuman

HAVC 191P: Light, Darkness, and Illumination (Topics in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture)

HAVC 191W: Art, Disaster, and Resilience

HAVC 249: How to Do Things with Pictures: Media, Culture, and Performance

Awards, Honors and Grants

Outstanding Teacher Award, Arts Division, UC Santa Cruz (2017)

Selected Publications

Books

Ways of Seeing After Dark (University of Minnesota Press, 2026)

A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes (University of Minnesota Press, 2023)

Collections

Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes (co-editor Jacob W. Lewis, Leuven University Press, 2021)

Articles / Chapters

"Metadata Is Not Data About Data" (in Decolonizing Data, 2023)

"Dispersal and Denial: Photographic Ubiquity and the Microbial Analogy" (in Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes, 2021)

"How Selfies Think: The Cognitive Dimensions of Digital Photography" (in Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie, 2021)

"Reading for Enactment: A Performative Approach to Digital Scholarship and Data Visualization" (Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019)

"Generative Assembly after Katrina" Critical Inquiry (Spring 2018)

"As We May Now Think: A Note on Vannevar Bush’s Scaffolding Claim" Archive Journal (November 2016)

Reviews

Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Critical Inquiry (2018)