Kyle Parry

User Kyle Parry

User Associate Professor

User831-459-1745

User parry@ucsc.edu

Arts Division

Associate Professor

Faculty

kyleparry.info

Porter College Academic
D-207

Porter D-207

Wednesdays 3-5pm or email with your availability

Porter Faculty Services

Kyle Parry researches across art, digital media, visual culture, critical theory, and the environmental humanities. His first book, A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes, argues for the power and pervasiveness of a transmedia cultural form called assembly. He is the coeditor of Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes, a book of new essays on the history and theory (and critique) of photographic ubiquity. He recently published an essay called "Metadata Is Not Data About Data," and he is completing a book called Ways of Seeing after Dark. His research has been published in Critical Inquiry, Debates in the Digital Humanities, and Archive Journal.

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

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 191W: Art, Disaster, and Resilience

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

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

Books

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

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)

Last modified: Sep 26, 2025