Shannon Mattern

Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her teaching and research address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. She has written about libraries and archives, media companies' headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. Formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, she has also taught at NYU, Parsons The New School for Design, and Rutgers University. She lives in New York City.

Publications

Books

• The New Downtown Library, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. [1]
• Deep Mapping the Media City, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, xvi+51 pp.
• Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 288 pp. [2]

Book chapters, papers, essays

• "Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins", Places, 22 May 2012.
• "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.
• "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.
• "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, 2016. [3]
• "Equipment for Redemptive Living", in Correctional Collections, ed. Joel Stoehr, New York: Parsons School of Design, 2016. [4]
• "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. [5]
• "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.
• "Sonic Archaeologies", in The Sound Studies Companion, ed. Michael Bull, New York: Routledge, 2017. [6]
• "Closet Archive: A stuffed history of the closet, where the “past becomes space”", Places, Jul 2017.
• "Mapping’s Intelligent Agents", Places, Sep 2017.
• "The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments: Inside the material archives of climate science", Places, Nov 2017.
• "Databodies in Codespace: As the bioengineering of people and cities converges, where do we locate the public sphere?", Places, Apr 2018.
• "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.

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

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.

Links

• Personal website
• Profile at New School, [7]
• Twitter