The Arts, Technology, and Democracy Forum: Shannon Mattern

Join THE ARTS AT LAFAYETTE for the Arts, Democracy, and Technology Forum with Prof. Shannon Mattern. Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council, a state-founded, member-supported, non-profit network connecting hundreds of libraries and archives. In Spring 2025, she was the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, a position nominated by the Librarian of Congress herself; and in Summer 2025, she was invited to serve as the Designer Indexer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Across 23 years in the academy, Mattern has held tenured full professorships in three fields: media studies, anthropology, and art history. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; sites where data intersect with art and design; and media that shape our sensory experiences. She is the author of four books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media (winner of the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture from the Media Ecology Association), all published by the University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press in 2021. She has also (co-)edited four collections on urban technology and quotidian media practices (“Media Study Beyond Media Studies: Pandemic Lessons for an Evolving Field,” “Digital Frictions” (with Mariana Mogilevich and Josh McWhirter), How to Run a City Like Amazon (with Mark Graham, Rob Kitchin, and Joe Shaw), and “Notes, Lists & Everyday Inscriptions“). She has published over 100 articles and book chapters about a range of topics — from experimental libraries, geo-archives, deep-time document preservation, lichen typography, and “tree thinking” to local data stewardship, public design processes, pneumatic tubes, field guides, repair manuals, and dashboards. Most of this work appears in open-access venues, including a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape.