Shannon Mattern
Biographic Data
| ID | 200310 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shannon Mattern |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shannon |
| FAMILY NAME | Mattern |
| SIGNATURE | MATTERN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4630-3982 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Modeling doubt: A speculative syllabus
In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author’s May 2023 inaugural K…
Auscultação urbana: Ou Percebendo a Ação Do Coração
Frequentemente, as operações internas do corpo humano podem ser ouvidas e, há séculos, aqueles que curam têm se utilizado da auscultação – a prática de ouvir o corpo, normalmente com o auxílio de aparelhos e máquinas – para avaliar a saúde e diagnosticar doenças. As cidades também já se prestaram à análise sonora, tendo sido comparadas tanto a corpos como a máquinas. Este artigo examina como os métodos de escuta urbana, através de ouvidos humanos…
Learning from lines: Critical Covid data visualizations and the quarantine quotidian
In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled-and …
The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fairs, Fiches, and Fantasies
Alongside the robots, rockets, kitchen appliances, and other technical wonders displayed at the great expositions and world's fairs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, visitors frequently found deceptively staid demonstrations of banal bureaucratic tools: cards, fiches, and files. Yet these technologies of information management were aestheticized and presented as integral to the generation and pursuit of the fairs' ambitious 'world projec…
Maintenance and Care
Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and urbanization
“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis...,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient epigraphy to contemporary graffiti; how written documents have been critical to our cities’ operations; and how our scripts’ formal properties are often reflected in urban form.
Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound
“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19 th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. I explain how these technologies have shaped, and continue to shape, urban form, and make themselves heard in the urban environment.
Steel and Ink: The Printed City
“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.
Speaking Stones: Voicing the City
“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, and vocal expressions of affect. We consider ancient urban acoustics and the ongoing evolution of spatio-sonic politics related to such issues as the Muslim call to prayer and political protest.
Conclusion: Coding Urban Pasts and Futures
“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of materialities, temporalities, and geographies; the cultural politics of media archaeology and archaeology-proper; and the potential implications of these past-oriented fields of exploration for our urban-media futures.
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories
Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis
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—we…
Deep Mapping the Media City
Using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern cityâ s roots in time, Shannon Mattern advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities
Embracing the Formalist Mantle
Animated Spaces: Experience and Context in Interaction and Architectural Design Exhibitions
Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of…
Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects
Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics
The past five years have brought several exhibitions, conferences, and other events that examine the past, present, and future of architectural periodicals. Incited in large part by the transformations wrought by new digital and social media in both architecture and publishing, these events reflect a desire among their participants to shape the materiality of architectural discourse—and even to frame the creation of discursive space as a form of …
Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place
The 2006 renovation of Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, one of the few American designs by the noted Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, sparked an international controversy over the means and ends of architectural preservation. Arching over these debates about architectural heritage, the responsibility of the Harvard administration, the quality of Fixler’s renovation, and so on, were larger, often unarticulated, questions about what consti…
Chainbuilding: A New Building for the New New School
Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar
In 2003 Qatar commissioned a young graphic designer to create a new graphic identity for the nation. The award-winning logo was intended to reinforce the history, values, religion, and language Qatar shares with other Arab countries and, simultaneously, the commitment to progressive development that aligns Qatar with the West. The contradictions ultimately prove too much for a typeface-and even for the nation-to sustain. Ultimately, what is brand…
Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library
Public libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking ab…
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories
Learning from lines: Critical Covid data visualizations and the quarantine quotidian
In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled-and …
The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fairs, Fiches, and Fantasies
Alongside the robots, rockets, kitchen appliances, and other technical wonders displayed at the great expositions and world's fairs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, visitors frequently found deceptively staid demonstrations of banal bureaucratic tools: cards, fiches, and files. Yet these technologies of information management were aestheticized and presented as integral to the generation and pursuit of the fairs' ambitious 'world projec…
Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library
Public libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking ab…
Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects
Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics
The past five years have brought several exhibitions, conferences, and other events that examine the past, present, and future of architectural periodicals. Incited in large part by the transformations wrought by new digital and social media in both architecture and publishing, these events reflect a desire among their participants to shape the materiality of architectural discourse—and even to frame the creation of discursive space as a form of …
Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place
The 2006 renovation of Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, one of the few American designs by the noted Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, sparked an international controversy over the means and ends of architectural preservation. Arching over these debates about architectural heritage, the responsibility of the Harvard administration, the quality of Fixler’s renovation, and so on, were larger, often unarticulated, questions about what consti…
Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar
In 2003 Qatar commissioned a young graphic designer to create a new graphic identity for the nation. The award-winning logo was intended to reinforce the history, values, religion, and language Qatar shares with other Arab countries and, simultaneously, the commitment to progressive development that aligns Qatar with the West. The contradictions ultimately prove too much for a typeface-and even for the nation-to sustain. Ultimately, what is brand…
Resonant Texts: Sounds of the American Public Library
Public libraries have long been associated with silence and order. Historians have argued that the architecture of library buildings has served in disciplining patrons into silent reading subjects. I argue that, in light of evolving, subjective definitions of and responses to noise, changing philosophies of librarianship and library design and the proliferation of media formats and the sounds they emit, we need to consider new ways of thinking ab…
Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar
In 2003 Qatar commissioned a young graphic designer to create a new graphic identity for the nation. The award-winning logo was intended to reinforce the history, values, religion, and language Qatar shares with other Arab countries and, simultaneously, the commitment to progressive development that aligns Qatar with the West. The contradictions ultimately prove too much for a typeface-and even for the nation-to sustain. Ultimately, what is brand…
Chainbuilding: A New Building for the New New School
Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics
The past five years have brought several exhibitions, conferences, and other events that examine the past, present, and future of architectural periodicals. Incited in large part by the transformations wrought by new digital and social media in both architecture and publishing, these events reflect a desire among their participants to shape the materiality of architectural discourse—and even to frame the creation of discursive space as a form of …
Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place
The 2006 renovation of Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, one of the few American designs by the noted Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, sparked an international controversy over the means and ends of architectural preservation. Arching over these debates about architectural heritage, the responsibility of the Harvard administration, the quality of Fixler’s renovation, and so on, were larger, often unarticulated, questions about what consti…
Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects
Embracing the Formalist Mantle
Animated Spaces: Experience and Context in Interaction and Architectural Design Exhibitions
Recent exhibitions of interaction design have sought, and often struggled, to capture within the space of a traditional gallery the multisensorial, often performative nature of the user experience and the richness of the contexts within which that experience takes place. Similarly, many architecture exhibitions have attempted to reinvent the place of architecture in the modern museum—to portray architecture as a multimodal, multisensory shaper of…
Deep Mapping the Media City
Using techniques like excavation and mapping to discover the modern cityâ s roots in time, Shannon Mattern advocates for urban media archaeology, a multisensory approach to investigating the material history of networked cities
Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis
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—we…
Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and urbanization
“Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis...,” examines the entwined histories of brick-making, mark-making, and city-building. I examine how urban surfaces have served as substrates for writing, from ancient epigraphy to contemporary graffiti; how written documents have been critical to our cities’ operations; and how our scripts’ formal properties are often reflected in urban form.
Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound
“Waves and Wires: Cities of Electric Sound,” describes how, since the mid-19 th century, our urban atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications: telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. I explain how these technologies have shaped, and continue to shape, urban form, and make themselves heard in the urban environment.
Steel and Ink: The Printed City
“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.
Speaking Stones: Voicing the City
“Speaking Stones: Voicing the City,” considers how the city itself functions as a sounding board, resonance chamber, and transmission medium for vocality: public address, interpersonal communication, and vocal expressions of affect. We consider ancient urban acoustics and the ongoing evolution of spatio-sonic politics related to such issues as the Muslim call to prayer and political protest.
Conclusion: Coding Urban Pasts and Futures
“Coding Urban Pasts and Futures,” uses the recent reconstruction of Palmyra’s destroyed Arch of Triumph as a case study to explore many themes that resonate throughout the book: the entangling of materialities, temporalities, and geographies; the cultural politics of media archaeology and archaeology-proper; and the potential implications of these past-oriented fields of exploration for our urban-media futures.
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media
Offering powerful new ways of thinking about our cities, Shannon Mattern goes far beyond the historical concepts of origins, development, revolutions, and the accomplishments of an elite few. Her vivid prose leads readers through a historically and geographically broad range of stories and takes media archaeology to the city’s streets, revealing new ways to write our urban, media, and cultural histories
Maintenance and Care
Auscultação urbana: Ou Percebendo a Ação Do Coração
Frequentemente, as operações internas do corpo humano podem ser ouvidas e, há séculos, aqueles que curam têm se utilizado da auscultação – a prática de ouvir o corpo, normalmente com o auxílio de aparelhos e máquinas – para avaliar a saúde e diagnosticar doenças. As cidades também já se prestaram à análise sonora, tendo sido comparadas tanto a corpos como a máquinas. Este artigo examina como os métodos de escuta urbana, através de ouvidos humanos…
Learning from lines: Critical Covid data visualizations and the quarantine quotidian
In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled-and …
The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fairs, Fiches, and Fantasies
Alongside the robots, rockets, kitchen appliances, and other technical wonders displayed at the great expositions and world's fairs of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, visitors frequently found deceptively staid demonstrations of banal bureaucratic tools: cards, fiches, and files. Yet these technologies of information management were aestheticized and presented as integral to the generation and pursuit of the fairs' ambitious 'world projec…
Modeling doubt: A speculative syllabus
In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author’s May 2023 inaugural K…
Sociology (14 works) · Art (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Visual arts (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · History (7 works)