On Index Cards and Infrastructures

Mapping Information
Across Scales

Shannon Mattern | The New School

wordsinspace.net | @shannonmattern

Library of Congress Card Division, ca. 1919

Alan Fletcher
Yayoi Kusama
Blade Runner 2049
Étienne-Louis Boullée, Bibliothèque du Roi, 1785
Herman MIller
Glenn Ligon, Mark Dion, Ann Hamilton
 Thomas Demand, Archive

Media Objects
Sensors + Screens: Infrastructural + Interfacial Objects
The Card, the Catalog, the Expo

Small, Moving Parts: bits of information scale up to global visions

The Architecture, the City, the Networked World
1939 Worlds Fair
AT&T Exhibit, NYPL Digital Collection 1652518, 1652487
Hagley Museum
1964-5 Worlds Fair
NCR Game Room; NCR Souvenir Print-Out; IBM Russian-to-English Translation
2006, 2009, 2007
2012
Footnote: materialities of notetaking
Files, Apparatae, Furnishings
Larger Project on
Intellectual Furnishings
Furniture for Automated Labor; Zoe Beloff; Frank + Lillian Gilbreth’s Motion Studies
New Media Ergonomics
Doris Salcedo: furnishing affect + containing loss
Allan Wexler
 Apple Park

Media Architectures
MVRDV / TUPDI, Tianjin Binhai Library, 2017
Alvar Aalto, Woodberry Poetry Room, 1949
Louis Kahn, Class of 1945 Library, Exeter, NH, 1971
Neutelings Riedijk Architects, Hilversum, Netherlands, 2006
Multisensorial Epistemologies + Exhibition Spaces
Networked Libraries
 Blade Runner 2049

Media Cities
Historicizing “Smart”
Historicizing Urban Communication Networks + Their Rhetorical Topoi
Historicizing the Indexical Landscape
Globalized Genealogies
Epistemological Alternatives to ”Smart”
Intelligent Citizens + Urban Data
Mapping Across Scales
Mulitisensorial + Affective Mapping
Machinic Readings + Mapping of Landscape
Indigenous, Participatory + Other-Species Mappings
Jakob Winkler

An Atlas of Partial Knowing

Experiential
Mapping
Scaling up from small
indices in order to
comprehend vast
geographies.
Superflux, Drone Aviary; Mapping Objects -> Mapping Networks
James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape
Instrumented Perception + Its Politics
Must consider the epistemological, ethical, and political
implications of rescaling – in observation, mapping, design
Ann Hamilton, the event of a thread
 Thank you.
Shannon Mattern
The New School | New York
wordsinspace.net | @shannonmattern