Andy Stuhl

Andy Kelleher Stuhl is a doctoral student in Communication Studies at McGill, working under the supervision of Jonathan Sterne. He holds a master's degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where his thesis examined interactive musical works and tensions at the juncture of sonic arts and software infrastructures. Andy's ongoing work uses media history to hone subversive potentials amid cultural platformization, tracing legacies of automation and artistic experimentation in American radio. His research is supported by the FRQSC, and he is a member of the HASTAC Scholars network. 

Project

Unmaking a Medium: Art and Automation in American Radio, 1950-2010 (doctoral dissertation, ongoing) examines the role that automation played – and the culturally contextual of automation that emerged – in the formatting, consolidation, and institutional crises of American music radio after World War II and into the 21st century. As the technological story of automation unfolded, artistic interventions in sonic transmission imagined an otherwise to the homogeneous future toward which commercial radio lurched. Mapping the two histories together will capture important precedents for artists and researchers who today contend with opaque and monopolized infrastructures for cultural distribution. This research is supported by an FRQSC doctoral scholarship.