I’m a technologist, writer, and researcher pursuing a PhD in information science at Cornell University. At Cornell, I’m a member of the Computing on Earth Lab led by Steve Jackson and the Interplay Research Studio led by Malte Jung.
My research focuses on developing new conceptual tools (using code and philosophy) and ethnographic strategies for studying algorithms in the world, from the planetary scale to the urban.
I’m currently conducting an ethnography of delivery drivers and the algorithms that govern them in the streets of New York City. This project draws upon Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis.
I love bringing big ideas to life. Recently, I co-founded Ergal Press with Jared Moore where we published his satirical novel about AI. At around the same time, I was the Editorial Coordinator for Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s book Who Are We Now?. Currently, I’m working on two other book projects.
Previously, I was a member of The Terraforming design research program at the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture, and Design.
During the pandemic, I was a researcher at the 3A institute within the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Here I developed course material for a new, hands-on design and prototyping course within the Applied Cybernetics intensive 1-year master’s program, drawing upon cybernetics to responsibly, safely, and sustainably scale cyber-physical systems.
During my graduate studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, I created and taught an undergraduate computer ethics course and building off that experience co-developed another with Jared Moore, that they continue to teach today.
I also assisted teaching a novel course at the intersection of machine intelligence, critical theory, computational neuroscience, big history (among many other subjects) formally titled “Intelligent Machinery, Identity, and Ethics”, but affectionally known as IMC (or “the intelligent machinery course”).
During my master’s I researched mobile robotics in the Personal Robotics Lab, launched a low cost robotics platform for research and education called MuSHR and helped develop course materials for an undergraduate robotics course. The robots are now found in universities and maker spaces around the world!
I’m occasionally on Github, Twitter and Instagram.
johanmichalove [at] gmail.com
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