Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at Cal Tech. He is a historian of modern visual culture and media and their intersections with histories of science and technology. His research focuses on world making and the creation of artificial environments, from media architecture and visual representation to energy infrastructure, climate control, and terraforming. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and their Forms (New York: Columbia UP, 2025);The Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Experience of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia UP, 2015); and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.