Shannon Mattern

Shannon Mattern is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The New School in New York. For 14.5 years she served as a faculty member in The New School’s School of Media Studies. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She's the author of three books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press. A City Is Not a Computer is under contract with Princeton University Press. Shannon Mattern has also written several dozen journal articles and book chapters, and she writes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places, an open-access journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. She contributes to public design and interactive projects and exhibitions, too. And from 2006 to 2009 she directed the 600-student Graduate Program in Media Studies. She lives in New York City. (2020)

Publications

Books, dossiers

• The New Downtown Library, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, 193 pp. Publisher. Review: Kruszewski (TSB, PL).

• Deep Mapping the Media City, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, xvi+51 pp.

• Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 288 pp. Publisher. Reviews: Kane (Afterimage), Jackson (Tech & Cult), Umney (J Cult Econ).

• editor, Urban Omnibus: "Digital Frictions", New York: Architectural League of New York, Sep 2019-Jan 2020.

• co-editor, How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables, London: Meatspace Press, Oct 2019.

• A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences, New York: Princeton University Press, Aug 2021, 200 pp. Interview. Publisher.

Book chapters, papers, essays

• "Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins", Places, 22 May 2012.

• "Paju Bookcity: The Next Chapter", Places, Jan 2013.

• "Infrastructural Tourism", Places, 1 Jul 2013.

• "Ear to the Wire: Listening to Historic Urban Infrastructures", Amodern 2: "Network Archaeologies", Oct 2013.

• "Bureaucracy’s Playthings", Reanimation Library’s Word Processor, 28 Oct 2013.

• "Methodolatry and the Art of Measure: The New Wave of Urban Data Science", Places, 5 Nov 2013.

• "Preserving Yesterday's Tech to Get a Better Gasp on Today's", Nautilus, 22 Nov 2013.

• "Interfacing Urban Intelligence", Places, 28 Apr 2014.

• "Animated Spaces: Experience and Context in Interaction and Architectural Design Exhibitions", Senses & Society 9:2, Spring 2014, pp 131-150.

• "Library as Infrastructure", Places, 9 Jun 2014.

• "Intellectual Furnishings", Medium, 19 Oct 2014.

• "Speculative Archaeology", Places, 12 Dec 2014.

• "Un-conventionalizing Convention", Medium, 11 Jan 2015.

• "Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard", Places, Mar 2015.

• "Deep Time of Media Infrastructure", in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, eds. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
  • "El tiempo profundo de la infraestructura mediática", trans. Nicolás Llano Linares, InMediaciones de la Comunicación 14:2, Dec 2019, pp 211-232. (Spanish)

• "Middlewhere: The Landscape of Library Logistics", Urban Omnibus, Jun 2015; repr. as "Behind New York’s Library Network", Motherboard, 21 Jul 2015.

• "Indexing the World of Tomorrow", Places, Feb 2016.

• "Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019", Places, Apr 2016.

• "Cloud and Field", Places, Aug 2016.

• "Animated Aberrations, Rebellious Objects", Volume 49, Sep 2016, pp 39-43. On Zoe Beloff.

• "Public In/Formation", Places, Nov 2016.

• "Equipment for Redemptive Living", in Correctional Collections, ed. Joel Stoehr, New York: Parsons School of Design, 2016.

• "Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and Urbanization", Cultural Politics 12(3): "Geological Media", ed. Jussi Parikka, Fall 2016, pp 310-331.

• "Before BILLY: A Brief History of the Bookcase", Harvard Design Magazine 43: "Shelf Life", Fall/Winter 2016.

• "A City Is Not a Computer", Places, Feb 2017; repr. in Historic Cities: Issues in Urban Conservation, eds. Jeff Cody and Francesco Siravo, Los Angeles: J. P. Getty Museum, 2019.

• "Closet Archive: A stuffed history of the closet, where the “past becomes space”", Places, Jul 2017.

• "Sonic Archaeologies", in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, ed. Michael Bull, New York: Routledge, Oct 2018. Proofs. Publisher. [1]

• "Mapping's Intelligent Agents", Places, Sep 2017; repr. in Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age, eds. Pol Bargués-Pedreny, David Chandler, and Elena Simon, Routledge, Nov 2018. Publisher.

• "The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments: Inside the material archives of climate science", Places, Nov 2017.

• "Extract and Preserve: Underground Repositories for a Posthuman Future?", New Geographies 9: "Posthuman", eds. Mariano Gomez Luque and Ghazal Jafari, Harvard University Press, and Actar, Jan 2018, pp 52-59. Publisher. [2] [3]

• "Databodies in Codespace: As the bioengineering of people and cities converges, where do we locate the public sphere?", Places, Apr 2018.

• "Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures", in The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers, Routledge, May 2018. Publisher. [4]

• "Community Plumbing: How the hardware store orders things, neighborhoods, and material worlds", Places, Jul 2018.

• "All Eyes on the Border: In Trump’s America, the politics of recognition are changing", Places, Sep 2018.

• "Maintenance and Care: A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations", Places, Nov 2018.

• "Local Codes: Forms of Spatial Knowledge", Public Knowledge, San Francisco: SFMOMA & San Francisco Public Library, 18 Jan 2019.

• with Urban Intelligence, "Auditing Urban Intelligence: Interfacing Place-Based Knowledge", Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22:4, Mar 2019.

• "Networked Dream Worlds: Is 5G solving real, pressing problems or merely creating new ones?", Real Life, 8 Jul 2019.

• "Minimal Maintenance", Lapsus Lima, 2 Oct 2019.

• "Fugitive Libraries", Places, Oct 2019.

• "The Gentle Wind Doth Move Visibly", in I Stand in My Place with My Own Day Here: Site-Specific Art at The New School, ed. Frances Richard, Duke University Press, Oct 2019. Publisher.

• "Ether and Ore: An Archaeology of Urban Intelligences", in Ways of Knowing Cities, eds. Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, Dec 2019, pp 120-130, PDF. Publisher.

• "Fluttering Code: A Cultural and Aesthetic History of the Split-flap Display", Modes of Criticism 5: "Design Systems", Eindhoven: Onomatopee, Dec 2019, pp 49-63. [5] [6]

• "Auto-Advance: The Art of the Slide Deck", Art in America 108:2, Feb 2020, pp 64-69; posted as "Using PowerPoint, Artists Ask How Performative Presentations Shape Our Thinking", Art in America, 5 Feb 2020.

• "Post-It Note City", Places, Feb 2020.

• "Encrypted Repositories: Techniques of Secret Storage, From Desks to Databases", Amodern 9, Apr 2020.

• "Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 Briefings Draw on the Persuasive Authority of Powerpoint", Art in America, 13 Apr 2020.

• "Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart", Places, Apr 2020.
  • "Auscultação urbana: ou percebendo a ação do coração", trans. Eduardo Harry Luersen, RUA 26:2, Campinas: LABEURB, Nov 2020, pp 385-409. (Brazilian Portuguese)

• with Emily Bowe and Erin Simmons, "Learning from Lines: Critical COVID Visualizations and the Quarantine Quotidian", Big Data & Society, Jul 2020.

• "Calculative Composition: The Ethics of Automating Design", in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI, eds. Markus Dubber, Frank Pasquale, and Sunit Das, Oxford University Press, Jul 2020. [7]

• "The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fairs, Fiches, and Fantasies", Theory, Culture & Society 37:7-8, Oct 2020, pp 133-155. [8]

• "Shannon Mattern", in Ein Medium namens McLuhan. 37 Befragungen eines Klassikers, eds. Peter Bexte and Martina Leeker, Lüneburg: meson press, 2020, pp 52-53.

• "Purity and Security: Towards A Cultural History of Plexiglass", Places, Dec 2020.

• "Afterword", in Crowdsourcing, Constructing and Collaborating Methods and Social Impacts of Mapping the World Today, eds. Siddharth Peter deSouza, Nida Rehman, and Saba Sharma, Bloomsbury India, Dec 2020.

• "How to Map Nothing", Places, Mar 2021.

• "The Pulse of Global Passage: Listening to Logistics", in Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, eds. Matthew Curtis Hockenberry, Nicole Starosielski, and Susan Marjorie Zieger, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Sep 2021. [9]

• more: writings in Places, writings on Medium.com

Interviews

• Gina Conley, "Shannon Mattern", Figure/Ground Communication, Aug 2012.

• Trevor Owens, "Preservation Aesthetics: An interview with Shannon Mattern", The Signal: Digital Preservation, The Library of Congress, 9 Jun 2014.

• Christine Mitchell, "Media Archaeology of Poetry and Sound: A Conversation with Shannon Mattern", Amodern 4: "The Poetry Series", Mar 2015.

• "Woven Circuits: An Interview with Taeyoon Choi", in Bauhaus Futures, eds. Mike Ananny, Laura Forlano, and Molly Wright Steenson, MIT Press, Oct 2019, pp 215-223.

Links

• Personal website
• Profile on New School, [10]
• Twitter