Skip to the content
Search
Words In Space
Words in Space is the website of Shannon Mattern.
Menu
“Shelf Life” at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2017)
(Counter)Logics and Deep Histories of the Zone (the case of Paju Bookcity) (2014)
(You Can’t)-Do-It-Yourself Publishing (2014)
A Brief History of the Shelf
A City Is Not a Computer
A Map That Tracks Everything
About
Aftertaste (2015)
All Eyes on the Border
All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Quantifying the Human Condition (2017)
Amending Care: An Archaeology of Maintenance (2018)
Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 Briefings Draw on the Persuasive Authority of PowerPoint
Animated Aberrations, Rebellious Objects (on Zoe Beloff)
Animated Spaces: Experience and Context in Interaction and Architectural Design Exhibitions
Anthropology + Design: Objects, Sites and Systems
Anthropology of Networks
Archaeologies of Urban Intelligence (2018 – 2019)
Archival Aesthetics (2015)
Archived Course: Archives, Libraries + Databases
Archived Course: City and Sound
Archived Course: Digital Archives + Institutional Memory
Archived Course: Immediacy: Creating a Multimedia Online Journal
Archived Course: Media Education Lab
Archived Course: Media Exhibition Design
Archived Course: Media Research Methods
Archived Course: Media Space | Public Space
Archived Course: Media Theory
Archived Course: Mediating Spaces
Archived Course: Processes of Placemaking
Archived Course: Space, Place & Landscape in Contemporary Art
Archived Course: Textual Form
Archived Course: Urban Media Archaeology
Archived: Bookshelves to Big Data: Archaeologies of Knowledge
Archiving Learning as a Messy, Partial, and Political Process (2013)
Archizines’ Rustling Pages
Art Scavenger Hunt (2009)
Auditing Urban Intelligence
Bad Signal
Beyond the Seminar Paper @ CUNY Grad Center (2011)
Bibliographic Machines
Blog to Book, Space Beer to Ballard: The BLDGBLOG Book
Books to Broadband: South Korea’s Paju Bookcity (2012)
Boundary Condition: The Interface @ MLA (2017)
Broadcasting Space: China Central Television’s New Headquarters
Bureaucracy’s Playthings
Cabinet Logic (2016)
Cabinet Logics: An Intellectual History of Book Furniture (2018)
Cabinets, Codes & Catalogues (on Hardware Stores) (2018)
Calculative Composition
Calculative Composition: The Ethics of Automating Design (2019)
Care, Repair and Maintenance (2020)
Cartographic Archive (2015)
Catastrophe Slam: 2009
Chainbuilding: The Signature Building for the New New School
Civic Infrastructure Summit (2018)
Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics
Closet Archive
Cloud and Field (on field guides to global digital systems)
Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media
Code, Craft & Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries: 2019
Coding Urban Pasts + Presents (2018)
Collect + Control (2017)
Commoning the City (2020)
Community Plumbing (on hardware stores)
Conceptual Units: How Our Knowledge Institutions Materialize Intellectual and Cultural Values (2014)
Critical Futures 3 @ Storefront (2011)
Critiquing Platform Thinking (2014)
Curating Collections + Community @ Poets House (2015)
Curating, Conserving + Preserving (2013)
Data Archive Infrastructure
Data Artifacts, Infrastructures + Landscapes
Data Ecologies: A Green New Deal for Climate and Tech Reform (2020)
Data Fantasies and Operational Facts: 5G’s Infrastructural Epistemologies (2019)
Databodies in Codespace (on precision medicine and data-driven urban planning)
DataCase
DataSpaces: InFORMing the Urban Landscape (2013)
Deep and Mattering Cities (2017)
Deep Mapping the Media City
Deep Time of Media Infrastructure
Deep Time of Media Infrastructure (2012)
Delicious: Renovating the Mnemonic Architectures of Bookmarking
Democratizing the Archives: 2012-2014
Designing Methodologies
Designing Multisensory Exhibitions (2012)
Digital Frictions Series @ Urban Omnibus
Dirty Media Archaeology (2012)
Ear to the Wire: Listening to Historic Urban Infrastructures
Edge Blending: Light, Crystalline Fluidity, and the Materiality of New Media at Gehry’s IAC Headquarters
Embracing the Formalist Mantle
Emergent Infrastructures: 2013-2015
Encrypted Repositories
Encrypted Repositories (2018 – 2019)
Equipment for Redemptive Living
Ether / Ore: An Atlas of Urban Media (2018)
Ether and Ore: An Archaeology of Urban Intelligences
Evaluating Multimodal Work, Revisited
Executable Spatial Scripts
Extract and Preserve: Underground Repositories for a Posthuman Future
FAMILIA: Corporeal Care and Affective Ties
Field Archives: Ice, Sediment, and Soil as Document (2017)
Fifty (Thousand) Eyes on a Scene (2018)
Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place
Fluttering Code: A Cultural and Aesthetic History of the Split-Flap Display
Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar
Fugitive Libraries
Furnishing Intelligence
Furnishing the Cloud: 2015
Geometries of Reading, Light of Learning: Louis I. Kahn’s Library at Phillips Exeter
Glimmer: Refracting Rock (2019 – 2020)
Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography + Social Thought: 2014-2015
Hearing Infrastructure (2012)
How to Graft a City
How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables
In Rare Fashion: Special Collections’ Infrastructural Aesthetics (2014)
In Wild Air
In-formation (2018)
Indexical Landscapes (2015)
Indexical Landscapes: 2015
Indexing the World of Tomorrow
Infernal Archive: Medial States of Matter in the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Information Professional (Dutch) Interview
Infrastructural Intelligence (2016)
Infrastructural Tourism
Infrastructures for Tomorrow’s Urban Intelligences
Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019
Intellectual Furnishings (2014)
Interfaces Aren’t Just Screens (2019)
Interfacing Urban Intelligence
Interfacing Urban Intelligence (2014)
Just How Public Is the Seattle Public Library? Publicity, Posturing and Politics in Public Design
Learning from Lines: Critical COVID Visualizations and the Quarantine Quotidian
Learning from the Library (without Cracking a Book) (2015)
Lebbeus Woods: The Politics of Small Things (2014)
Libraries + DIY Learning (2011)
Library as Emergent Infrastructure (2014)
Library as Infrastructure
Library Design Workshop (2015)
Lines+Nodes: Media, Infrastructure, Aesthetics: 2014
Local Codes: Forms of Spatial Knowledge
Local Codes: Forms of Spatial Knowledge (2018)
Looking from a Distance (2020)
Machines, Ecologies, Operating Systems, Parasites: City as Metaphor (2018)
Maintenance and Care
Map as Metaphor (2016)
Mapping as Method and Medium (2018)
Mapping Intelligent Agents (2017)
Mapping Time (2015)
Mapping Urban Media Infrastructures (2019)
Mapping’s Intelligent Agents
Maps Are Public Media (2018)
Maps as Media
Mapwashing: Co-Opting Civic Design (2019)
Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins
Media + Architecture
Media + Materiality
Media Archaeology of Poetry and Sound
Media Architecture + Archaeologies (2015)
Media, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
Methodolatry and the Art of Measure: The New Wave of Urban Data Science
Middlewhere: Landscapes of Library Logistics
Minimal Maintenance
Minimal Maintenance (2019)
Mission Control: A History of the Dashboard
Mud, Media + the Metropolis (2016)
Networked Dream Worlds (on 5G)
Notes, Lists, and Everyday Inscriptions
Of Mud, Media, and the Metropolis: Aggregating Histories of Writing and Urbanization
On Index Cards and Infrastructures (2017)
Our Libraries Aren’t Failing Us, We’re Failing Them
Pageantry of Paperwork: The 1939 World’s Fair, Remington Rand, and Designerly Filing (2015)
Paju Bookcity: The Next Chapter
Paper, Ash & Air: Material Remembering (2011)
PhDs for Polymaths (2011)
Platform Shift: Teaching on (Intentionally) Shaky Ground (2013)
Plurality in Place: Activating Public Places in Seattle
Post-It Note City (on the aesthetics of participatory design)
Precedents for Experimentation: Talking Libraries with Shannon Mattern and Nate Hill
Preservation Aesthetics
Preservation Aesthetics @ Library of Congress (2014)
Preserving Yesterday’s Tech to Get a Better Grasp on Today’s
Privacy in Public: A Distributed Exhibition: 2018-2019
Project Media Space | Public Space: 2005-2006
Public In/Formation
Puffs of Air: Communicating by Vacuum
Radical Shifts (2011)
Radio City: Sound, Space + the City (2012)
Re-envisioning Branch Libraries: 2014-2015
Re-Imagining the Public Library (2017)
Re/Lab: 2014-2016
Resonant Texts: Sounds of the Contemporary American Public Library
Response to “Ethnography: A Prototype” (2017)
Response to “The Politics of Sorting at Borders” (2016)
Review of Hillel Schwartz’s Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond
Review of Mark Shepard, Ed., The Sentient City
Review of Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects
San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures (2014)
Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Media Infrastructures as Critical and Generative Structures
SCMS Mapping Workshop (2011)
Sharing Is Tables: Furniture for Digital Labor
Sidewalk’s Sidewalk: A Pedestrian View of Sidewalk Toronto (2019)
Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Senses
Site Object Experience: Designing Material Media Spaces (2011)
Slide Decks of Salvation (2020)
Small Moving Parts (2017)
Smart Cities? Impossible, Political + Measuring Objects: 2017
Sonic Archaeologies
Sorting Things Out
Sorting Things Out II (SFPC 2018)
Sound + Space
Sound Studies: Framing Noise
Sound@NewSchool: 2012-2013
Sounding the Commons (2018)
Sounding Towers
SoundMatter @ CUNY Grad Center (2011)
Spatial Organization of Media (2015)
Speculative Archaeology
Stacks, Platforms, Interfaces: A Field Guide to Information Spaces (2017)
Strata of Sentience: Deep Mapping the Media City (2015)
Student Resources
Supply and Command (2018)
Testimonial Tables
The Archival Apparatus
The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments
The Cultural Techniques (+ Political Economy) of Theory-Making (2013)
The Gentle Wind Doth Move Visibly
The Housing System: State of Good Repair (2019)
The Library’s Other Intelligences: MOBIUS Fellowship with the Finnish Cultural Institute NY: 2017-2019
The Materiality of Radical Media (2012)
The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities
The New Everyday
The Pulse of Global Passage: Listening to Logistics (2018)
The Role of Libraries in the Digital Age (2020)
The Spectacle of Data: A Century of Fiches, Fairs and Fantasies
The Visual Rhetoric of Resilient Urbanism (2015)
The Vitality of the Archives (2015)
The World Silicon Valley Made
Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design
Thinking Through Interfaces
Time’s Interfaces (2017)
Timelines, Tickers, Maps + Dashboards (2016)
Tools: Anvils to Androids
Tuning into the Invisible: Roman Mars’s 99% Invisible
Typology of Topologies (+ Hearing and Smelling Infrastructure) (2016)
Understanding Media Studies
Understanding Media Studies Lecture Series: 2017
Understanding Media Studies Speaker Series: 2014-2015
Upcoming Events
Urban Auscultation
Urban Intelligence
Urban Research + Mobile Media (2011)
Urban Research Toolkit: 2009-2013
Urban Scanner (Interview)
Urban Software Art: Spaces of Critical Engagement
Using PowerPoint, Artists Ask How Performative Presentations Shape Our Thinking
Wikipedia + Feminist Epistemology (2015)
Willful Transgressions: Transdisciplinary Teaching (2018)
Wonder and Number: Panoramic Sensing (2017)
Woven Circuits
Search
Categories
Publications
Fugitive Libraries
“
Fugitive Libraries
,”
Places Journal
(October 2019)
