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, 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. Review: Kane (Afterimage). [2]
• co-editor, How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables, London: Meatspace Press, 2019.
• editor, Urban Omnibus: "Digital Frictions", New York: Architectural League of New York, Sep 2019-Jan 2020.

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.
• "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.
• 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, 2019.
• "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, 2019, pp 120-130.
• "Fluttering Code: A Cultural and Aesthetic History of the Split-Flap Display", Modes of Criticism 5, Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2020, pp 49-63. [7]
• "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.
• "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, 2020.
• with Emily Bowe and Erin Simmons, "Learning from Lines: Critical COVID Visualizations and the Quarantine Quotidian", Big Data & Society, Jul 2020.

• 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, 2019, pp 215-223.

Links

• Personal website
• Profile on New School, [8]
• Twitter