Masterclass with Shannon Mattern (The New School)

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

CITIES PROJECT
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis

Date: Friday, May 13, 2016
Time: 10:00-12:00
Place: University Library (Belle van Zuylenzaal), Singel 425
For: Research Master and PhD Students
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.

Short Bio
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

Visit our website: www.cities.humanities.uva.nl