Shannon Mattern: Tourism, Mud, Metropolis

Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities and Deep Mapping the Media City (both published by University of Minnesota Press), and she writes a regular column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. You can find her at www.wordsinspace.net

PUBLIC LECTURE

“Mud, Media, and the Metropolis”
ASCA Cities Project lecture by Shannon Mattern (The New School)

For: Open to all
Date: Friday, May 13, 2016
Time: 15:00-17:00
Place: University Theater, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18, Room 101A
Organizers: Christoph Lindner and Carolyn Birdsall
Contact: C.P.Lindner@uva.nl

This talk – part of a larger project that explores the longue durée, the deep time, of urban mediation – examines the aggregated histories of city-building, mud-molding and mark-making. For millennia mud and its geologic analogues have bound together our media, urban, architectural, and environmental histories. Some of the first writing surfaces, clay and stone, were the same materials used to construct ancient city walls and buildings, whose facades also frequently served as substrates for written texts. The formal properties of those scripts – the shapes they took on their clay or, eventually, parchment and paper foundations – were also in some cases reflected in urban form: how the city molded itself from the materials of the landscape. And those written documents have always been central to our cities’ operation: their trade, accountancy, governance, and culture.

Aggregating these often-separate historical lineages – media history, urban history, archaeology – has the potential to enrich the disparate disciplinary knowledges that are bound together here. Media scholars, for example, can learn to read their histories in archaeological ruins, and urban historians and archaeologists can better appreciate the centrality of communication and media history to their own fields. Thinking these histories in tandem also reveals the long history and expansive geography of urban mediation. Particularly in light of recent attempts to understand what kinds of intelligence are embodied in our digital “smart cities,” the comparatively “dumb” histories of mud and mark-making demonstrate that calculation, coding, and “embedded” technologies have long been integral to our cities’ infrastructures.

MASTERCLASS

“Infrastructural Tourism”
Masterclass with Shannon Mattern (The New School)

For: Research Master and PhD Students
Date: Friday, May 13, 2016
Time: 10:00-12:00
Place: University Library (Belle van Zuylenzaal), Singel 425
Organizers: Christoph Lindner and Carolyn Birdsall
Registration: nica-fgw@uva.nl
Contact: C.J.Birdsall@uva.nl

We seem to have come to a sudden recognition that the Internet is a place made of countless material things – cables and data centers and rare earth minerals. We’ve witnessed a dawning realization that our Amazonian consumptive appetites are dependent on similarly heavy logistical systems and exploitative labor practices. We’ve surrendered to the reality of the Anthropocene and its precarious infrastructural, environmental, political, and ethical futures. This emergent infrastructural intelligence has spawned an explosion of infrastructural “literacy” and engagement projects that seek to “make visible the invisible,” to call out the unrecognized, to bore into the “black-boxed.” Grand Tours of nuclear infrastructures and key sites in telecom history have inspired many a recent Bildungsroman, in myriad mediated forms. Apps and data visualizations, soundwalks and speculative design workshops, DIY manuals and field guides, urban dashboards and participatory mappings, hackathons and infrastructural tourism – strategies employed by artists and activists and even some city governments and federal agencies – all seek to “raise awareness” among a broader public about infrastructure’s existence and its politics. They aim, further, to motivate non-specialist communities to contribute to infrastructure’s maintenance and improvement, to inspire citizen-consumers to advocate for more accessible and justly distributed resources, and perhaps even to “engineer” their own DIY networks.

In this masterclass we’ll explore various pedagogical strategies, representational techniques, and modeling methods that have been employed to promote “infrastructural intelligence” — and we’ll consider what epistemologies, ontologies, ethics, affects, and politics are embedded in those approaches.