Alena J. Williams is Professor for Theory and Mediation of Contemporary Art in the Department for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She teaches courses in contemporary art history and theory; film and media studies; and the environmental humanities. Her research focuses on the epistemology of the image in art, film, and media with a long-range view across the twentieth century. Previously, Williams was Associate Professor with tenure in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, where she was Associate Director of the Environmental Studies Program. She also taught in the Department of Art History and Studio Art and the Graduate Art Program at Williams College and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Williams received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University in New York. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin; a DAAD Fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Design at the Universität der Künste Berlin; and a Society Fellow of the Cornell Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Visualizing Work: The Politics of Energy, Labor, and the Visual Archive, 1883-1933 

This project explores the history of electrification through the visual lens of one of the most significant international electrical firms of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). Visualizing Work focuses on the firm’s engagement of the visual—primarily photography, film, and exhibitions—from its inception in 1883 until 1933, tracing an arc through the decades in which displays of electrical innovation became closely aligned with debates on labor practices, hygiene, and efficiency, and ultimately culminated in the subsumption of these activities into the political program of National Socialism. It was a critical moment when the AEG’s practices, methods, and techniques of visual display were in their nascent stages, and its relationship to the political and social schema were at its most conflicted and contradictory, rendering it an unusually productive object of study for examining the emergence of the major modern nation state amidst, within, and against emergent internationalism and globalization. Reaching beyond the mere description and representation of activity, workers, and objects in the factory walls, this project traces the political and social relations between visual artifacts and design models, their referents, and their reproduction in a variety of media. It aims to situate the 'work' of the AEG within modern accounts of technology, which have varied from celebratory discussions of the machine to negative, dialectical understanding of its relationship to the body, society, and politics.