Electric Grid Politics: Media, Extraction, Disarticulation

Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia UP, 2015). His edited volume, In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020) won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Cinema Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao he edited “Media Climates,” the Winter 2022 issue of Representations, and he is currently editing, with Maggie Bell, “Art + Electric Light,” a special section of Leonardo. His next book is about the visual world of French oil and gas, 1944-1975.