Dr Ian Rothwell

Job title:

Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Digital Culture

Role:

Programme Director for Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating, Criticism (MSc)

ian.rothwell@ed.ac.uk

Office:

0.52, John Higgit Gallery, Hunter Building

Office hours:

Every Tuesday afternoon, by appointment

Research Output:

Edinburgh Research Explorer link

Biography

Dr Ian Rothwell is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art History and Digital Culture at the University of Edinburgh where he teaches research-led courses that deal with art, new media technologies, and the legacies of modernism today. His first monograph, Postinternet Art and its Afterlives, was published as part of the Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies Series in December 2023. This book analyses the various ways that contemporary art in the 2010s represented and critiqued the web 2.0 internet and wider technological infrastructures and cultural forms. Ian is also the co-editor of a collection of essays titled AI, capitalism and art history: essays on the new visual economy, due to be published early 2027 with Manchester University Press. This book situates AI within both longer histories of painting, photography, and cybernetics, and contemporary debates around capitalist abstraction, corporate power, and surveillance. It also asks how artists might appropriate AI critically, extending radical traditions of new media practice.

He is currently working on a new book project, Painting is Bad, which analyses painting as the "bad object" of contemporary art, and an article on the mediation of the contemporary internet, and its visual economy, within new forms of video art.

Research interests

Contemporary Art
Digital Culture
Modernism
Technology
Critical Theory

Teaching

Ian is Programme Director, Modern and Contemporary Art: History, Curating and Criticism MSc, and teaches the following course options:

Bad Painting: Humour, Sarcasm, and Stupidity in Modern and Contemporary Art (3rd year)
Images under Control: Aesthetics of Digital Culture (4th year)
Art and Digital Culture (PGT)

In addition, he contributes to the following team-taught courses:

Research Theories and Methods (PGT)
The Cultures and Politics of Display (PGT)
History of Art 2B: From Modernism and the Avant-Gardes to Postmodernism and the Culture Industry (UG)

In 2020 Ian achieved a Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Research

Recent and upcoming talks and publications include:

Talks

"Internet Cinema and Fascistic Dream Machines", as part of The Essay-Film, Then and Now, session at the Association for Art History 2026 (University of Cambridge, 9th April)
"Contemporary Painting and Robots", Royal College of Art, London 2025 (26th November)
Co-convener of AI, Automation, and Abstraction, panel at the Association of Art History Annual Conference 2024 (University of Bristol, 5th April)
"The Guilty Pleasure of Paint: Zombie Painting", as part of Guilty Pleasures: Art History and Other Clichés, panel at CAA 2024 (Chicago, 14th February)

Publications

AI, capitalism and art history: essays on the new visual economy (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2027). Co-editor with Dr Daniel Neofetou.
"Zombie Formalism and Working Aesthetics", Source: Notes in the History of Art, 44 (4) (July 2025), pp. 287-297.
"Horror, Fascism, and Expressionism: Jon Rafman's Art in the Age of 4Chan", in Andrea Wood and Jamie McDaniel (eds.), Broadening the Horror Genre: From Gaming to Paratexts (Routledge, 2024).
Postinternet Art and its Afterlives (Routledge, 2024).
"Thomas Ruff and the Horror of Digital Photography", Philosophy of Photography, Vol. 12. No. 1 - 2 (January 2023), pp. 93 - 109.
"Suicidal Experiments: the Earth represented in Red Bull’s Stratos", in Benek Cincik and Tiago Torres-Campos (eds.), Postcards from the Anthropocene Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation (dpr Barcelona, 2021), pp. 62 - 67.