Dr. Petten is a scholar, curator, exhibition designer, and creative director whose work examines the history of aesthetics and aesthetic innovation across creative and intellectual practices and traditions.
His primary areas of study are film, television, animation, and other forms of popular culture through the history of applied and commercial art and design. He is particularly interested in how aesthetic concepts, styles, and forms develop and change over time, and how those changes relate to formal experimentation and broader technological, industrial, political, and cultural developments.
His work combines historical poetics and neoformalism with conceptual history and analytic approaches to aesthetics and intellectual history. Through contextual and comparative analysis, he examines these developments within and across specific historical phases and eras.
He is currently co-editing an anthology examining the history of cartoon animation through multiple historical frameworks, providing creative direction for an immersive laser installation titled Consilience, and curating and co-designing an exhibition titled Embodiment: Bodies by Design at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio.
