“Encrypted Repositories” Amodern 9 (April 2020)
Encrypted Repositories

“Encrypted Repositories” Amodern 9 (April 2020)
“Indexing the World of Tomorrow,” Places (February 2, 2016)
on filing and the 1939 World’s Fair — or, on the aesthetics of administration and the urban imaginary
In November 2015, I gave a talk in the Media Design Practices Program at ArtCenter College of Design. I spoke about Remington Rand, “designerly” filing and administration, and the 1939 World’s Fair. This research was eventually published as “Indexing the World of Tomorrow” in Places Journal. You can find my slides here.
I wrote about paperwork, play, and the aesthetics of administration — using Mina Johnson and Norman Kallaus’s 1967 Records Management textbook as my launching pad — for the Reanimation Library‘s “Word Processor” series. Here’s my intro:
For more than half a century Jack Wilkinson’s office supply store stood on the corner of Allegheny Street and Cherry Alley in my hometown of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. When I was a little girl, we’d make frequent visits—not to stock up on supplies for my dad’s hardware store or my mom’s classroom and volunteer activities, but at my request. On birthdays and Christmas I’d come in with a list: invoices, restaurant order forms, cash box, label maker, rubber date stamp, accounting book. These were my toys.
“Bureaucracy’s Playthings,” Reanimation Library’s Word Processor (October 29, 2013)
on the aesthetics of record-keeping and paperwork
“Delicious: Renovating the Mnemonic Architectures of Bookmarking” In Trebor Scholz, Ed., Learning Through Digital Media: Essays on Technology and Pedagogy (Institute for Distributed Creativity, 2011).