tonight's lecture I should say it's been
supported by the Robert B Church
Memorial Lecture Fund I just wanna say
thanks to everybody for coming down on a
Thursday it's a little off schedule for
us and I really appreciate everyone
being here tonight thanks also to the
hard work of the committee
that's Gale Rana Jennifer Akerman and
Dianne Foxx myself and thanks also to
Jason continued support on all things
lecture lecture series related tonight
it's my pleasure to introduce Shannon
Mattern
Shannon is an associate professor of
associate professor in the School of
Media Studies at the new school in New
York
Shannon is what I would like to call a
media theorist if I may but it would be
I think very easy to dismantle my
assumption there by just simply
surveying the things that she's
interested in in exchanges with Shannon
over the content of what her lecture
would be here at UTK which gave me a
sense of what she's working on at
present what she's currently up to it
became clear to me just how diverse and
thorough her work really is she ranges
freely from artificial intelligence to
ancient indigenous cartography for
instance from the extent from extensive
data centers to the library and archive
of older times or from fast moving bits
into dirt and grit and she does all this
I might add with a certain deafness and
scholarly ease it looks like to me and
she's also just really interesting she
Shannon writes things that are fun to
read and that stitch things together in
unexpected ways but that also when you
read them seem completely natural
she compares current ways of acting in
the world which seem very new and novel
to all of us too much older streams from
where they came she's the author of so
many things that is hard to pick just a
few but in particular she's authored the
books on the new downtown library
designing with communities in 2006 deep
mapping the media city in 2015
and very recently code and clay data and
dirt 5,000 years of urban media that
came out this year just last week as it
turns out all from the University of
Minnesota press she also writes regular
regularly for places journal which is
very interesting really really
interesting journal to follow for
instance articles like a city is not a
computer about ways of thinking about
urbanism and urban culture within the
logic of tech startups and near infinite
data accumulations or mapping
intelligent mappings intelligent agents
about kinds of machine vision that are
becoming ubiquitous and how they
rerender the world that we inhabit or
even an interesting one for me a brief
history of the Shelf which is all about
kind sorry in which she and live-ins
perhaps the least considered part of the
library or the archive especially is
there especially as it reflects on
digitized present conditions like Amazon
warehouses for instance I think
Shannon's a kind of architectural secret
agent by virtue of by virtue of finding
all the connections and tethers between
architecture and the rest of the world
she tends to see things that were right
in front of us all along but none of us
yet knew how to recognize them instead
of choosing a time a place or a
particular set of content she owns up to
the 21st century's demand to find short
circuits between them and she's the the
kind of writer and scholar I think that
can jar disciplines of like architecture
out of their own self-obsession and into
a broader exchange with what courses
through them so without further ado
please join me in welcoming
I hope this is being recorded because I
was like the nicest introduction I've
ever received when I'm depressed I need
to play that back but not look at myself
because I hate looking at pictures of
myself so just listen to the audio so I
want to thank Mark for bringing me here
and also thanks to Micah and Jason for
providing great company and
transportation and all the other faculty
and to you for being here maybe you have
to be here maybe you're here voluntarily
either way I really appreciate your
being here and so yes as Mark said I am
in media studies but I somehow have made
an academic career intentionally
disregarding disciplinary boundaries I
wouldn't advise that for everybody but
somehow I'm grateful it's worked for me
because I think most of the world's most
interesting challenges and interesting
things to think about are go beyond the
realm of any particular discipline
anyway so also I will say when I was
talking with Mark about what would be a
fitting thing to talk about here he
encouraged me to survey the
breadth of what I do that's not
something that more traditional writers
are asked to do to artists and
architects often do surveys of their
work usually academics will present one
particular project one very specific
thing so it's kind of liberating and
really nice to be able to just go over a
survey what I've done over the past
several years and try to come in to
different themes so I hope it's useful
for you so I will start by reading a
little bit and then I will drop the
script and start just to talk more
extemporaneously about some of these
different projects and also I appreciate
your dorkiness for actually wanting to
come out for a talk it has index cards
in the title so okay sorry if I did that
all right
so epistemology is the study of
knowledge a mouthful of a word like this
you might presume fits within the realm
of philosophy and you'd be right it
typically does philosophers are
interested in what it means to know
something how much we can know and how
we come to know things they're
interested in how we use reason and our
senses our sight and hearing and touch
to know the world and to know one
another and needed to grasp abstract
concepts like love and truth and beauty
get debates over epistemology aren't
just happening in the seminar
and dorm rooms of the Academy today
thanks in part to the 2016 election and
the new regime in Washington
epistemology is the stuff of dinner
table conversations newspaper articles
and White House press briefings ours is
the era of fake news alternative facts
and filter bubbles of ransomware and
rogue federal agency Twitter feeds of
massive document leaks and disappearing
climate data faith and fact suspicion and
certainty are all tangled up and I also
want to emphasize that the politics of
epistemology are Party agnostic this
isn't a left or a right issue it's
definitely a discourse that kind of
encompasses both meanwhile in the labs
of our premier research institutions our
major tech companies
scrappy startups and even administrative
offices a new kind of certainty is
taking hold algorithms offer ostensibly
a political means of making data
actionable of tracking behaviors and
filtering facts in order to determine
what kinds of shoes you might like to
purchase or whether or not you get a
mortgage or what the terms of your
parole might be heaven forbid neural
nets processed data sets far larger than
our brains could parse in a lifetime to
aid an image and speech identification
and pattern recognition and in
predicting for instance where we should
deploy disaster relief resources or
invest in new infrastructure these
technologies have countless applications
in architecture and urban planning and
administration the bigness of data
engenders new ways of knowing as Chris
Anderson famously proclaimed in 2008
quote petabytes allow us to say
correlation is enough we can stop
looking for models we can analyze the
data without hypotheses about what it
might show we can throw the numbers into
the biggest computing clusters the world
has ever seen
and less statistical algorithms find
patterns where science cannot end quote
and in many cases I'd add where reason
cannot we don't know why there's a
pattern we just know there is one this
world of algorithmic absolutism isn't so
far removed from the faith-based world
of politics we see today and not just
today it kind of in perpetuity the
data-driven design studio and administer
of office are both mobilized by faith in
empiricism and faith in the machine
faith in its omniscience it's a
inexhaustibility attack this never gets
tired crunching numbers it's suppose an
immunity to politics and to human error
so over the past five years or so I've
explored the new
epistemologies of design in a series of
articles four places journal a venue for
public scholarship on architecture
urbanism and landscape and methodology
in the art of measure for instance I
looked at designs tendency to fetishize
and aestheticized data if you have a
data visualization it must be true and
it's really excitingly true too - - and to
reify data-driven methods in interfacing
urban intelligence and another article
called history of the urban dashboard I
looked at how our interfaces to urban
flows and data streams construct our
understanding of what matters in a city
what's worth knowing and how these
technologies delimit our roles as urban
subjects the interface in a way defines
our available modes of urban interaction
in instrumental city I studied New
York's humongous Hudson yard development
on the far west side of Manhattan which
is either one of the biggest or the
biggest real estate development projects
in the United States if not now but one
of the biggest in history - this is also
where alphabet formerly Google's
sidewalk labs is headquartered and we're
real estate developers data scientists
and city officials are infusing
smartness into everything imaginable its
feats of structural it's smart it's
infusing that smartness into its feats
of structural engineering it's
responsive architectures its soil as you
can see on the left even the soil is
smart
its energy systems its networks of
sensors it's well-to-do inhabitants who
will consent to allow managers to learn
everything that they can about them
through their smartphones and smart
homes the smart city is making an
epistemological claim which should make
us wonder what does this smart to City
know and what are we supposed to know
about its operations yet urban smartness
isn't dependent on apps or an Internet
of Things as the argument another piece
for places the smart cities
epistemological and technological
foundations were laid long ago even
before the rise of computing as we know
it today and before data driven
after the Second World War the late 19th
century brought us the index card and the
file to early status storage systems
that not only prompted new modes of
organizing information about people and
urban operations but also required newly
designed furnishings and architectures
to house them
these small material bits of information
built a material world around themselves
card catalogues filing cabinets and then
offices that had to be optimized for the
efficient flow of papers in which were
stacked atop one another to generate the
enormous file of the skyscraper itself
Paulette lay a Belgian lawyer and
information scientist argued from the
Nate 1890s of the 1930s that all the
world's knowledge should be winnowed his
term into the facts that could fit onto
index cards and all those cards should
be collected in cabinets which would
then themselves be organized into
buildings in a world city of knowledge
designed by Le Corbusier the plan never
materialized but this this
epistemological aspiration reflects a
timeless interest getting all the
world's scientists and scholars
accountants and actuaries mayors and
mathematicians on the same page or the
same card so to speak would promote
world peace and efficient governance and
advance the production of new knowledge
we said the same things in the early
days of the internet Mark Zuckerberg has
made similar claims about Facebook and
to a little Russia thing happened and
we've operated on similar principles of
information management and forming
architectural and urban design for
pretty much the entire history of our
vanity at least that's the premise of my
new book which we just published last
Wednesday in it I argue that our cities
have always been intelligent
environments they've always been
designed to generate and organize
information and as I write in the books
introduction this is a long quote from
millennia our cities have been designed
to foster broadcast
they've been wired these are all kind of
scare quotes around these they've been
wired for transmission they've hosted
architectures for the production and
distribution of various forms of
intelligence and served as hubs for
record management
they've rendered themselves readable to
humans and machines they've even written
their source code their operating
instructions on their facades and into
the urban form itself they've coded
themselves for both the administrative
technologies or proto algorithms they
oversee their operation and for the
people who have built and inhabit and
maintain them end quote
for nearly two decades I've been
examining how material architectures map
onto or mediate intellectual
architectures or you could substitute
infrastructures for architectures and
vice-versa how a material world and the
spaces and objects we design within it
both shape and are shaped by our
structures of thought the ways we know
the world shaped the world we build and
that built world reflexively informs our
knowing and because different
architectures or infrastructures are
typically entwined or nested within each
other across a scale like a card in the
card catalog or the widget in the
interface my exploration has traversed
various scales from the scale of the
object like the book the file card the
field guide the screen the interface the
desk to the architectural scale the
library the archive the in urban
intervention the exhibition the control
center to the urban scale or a look at
things like urban ancient urban
record-keeping and computational urban
visions at World's Fairs or contemporary
smart cities up to the scale of the
networks and clouds that link together
and extend beyond these other sites of
mediation thus my research has also span
different scales and practices of design
from interaction design product design
furniture design interior design service
design architecture urban design and
it's linked designed to other fields
particularly information science
intellectual history media studies and
geography an implicit argument in all of
this work the research and writing
curating and sometimes all of the events
I organize myself is the work that you
do as designers regardless of the scales
at which you intervene intersects with
all these other scales of practice and
these other disciplines and
epistemological concerns we come to know
the world largely by material means
through the gadgets we create and the
windows we frame in designing that
you designers participate in our ways of
knowing every piece of furniture every
interface every building every urban
plan can serve doesn't have to but can
serve as an epistemological apparatus
you'll be pleased to hear that within a
couple seconds or minute I would say I'm
gonna stop reading from this formal
introduction and transition into a more
informal survey of some of the projects
I've undertaken over the years but
before I do so I want to introduce a
couple frameworks that have helped to
structure the examples to follow so
first is a theoretical framework my own
ways of knowing are certainly informed
by all the theory and history of read
during and since graduate school but it
was only within the past few years that
I came to realize why for so long theory
was one way of knowing that made me
somewhat uncomfortable it's because the
politics of theories epistemological
economy if you can call it that it's
knowledge politics are so often based on
a great men model deities and their
dogmas like you must be true to Derrida
or I don't know what the repercussions
will be but so while the traces of my
theoretical influence are present in my
work it's not very often that I
explicitly named them you know call out
one Foucault whose notion of the tabula
the table is both architectural and
intellectual describing the fantastical
list of more cases of objects in Boris's
chinese encyclopedia he contrasts the
four legged table where we might lay out
objects in order to determine their
relationships to one another to sort
them you can track that with the graphic
table something we might sketch out by
hand or conjure up in Microsoft Word to
organize our knowledge into rows and
columns I'm really interested in how we
can map one table onto the other how our
ways of conceiving the worlds are made
manifest in our ways of building the
world and vice versa
the secondary the second preliminary
framer goal offer is aesthetic arts
subjectivity and willful non
systematicity might stand in contrast to
the orderly compulsions of
classification which we saw in the last
slide yet art and all its effect of
excess and unruliness has driven home
for me that knowing is just as much
sensor
experiential just as much spatial and
embodied as it is cognitive so in each
of the brief sections that follow I'll
integrate references to a few artists
whose own attempts to materialize
architect or perform epistemology have
profoundly inform my own thinking
so I classified my work into four
sections objects architecture cities and
networks so first media objects so my
work often this is really helpful with
teaching - especially for students who
were new to theory or history to start
with something really tiny and then
spiral out from it to see how it's
connected to all these interesting
historical and theoretical and
conceptual interests so I just survey
through a few of the projects that fit
within this category so if we look at
contemporary cities there are lots of
objects that give us things to think
with the sensors that are embedded into
the smart city for instance the
interfaces that we have which are
sometimes our only means of accessing
what's going on inside the operating
system which really don't reveal a whole
lot they're not gonna tell us what the
algorithms are determining they're
essentially just giving us what
improvement and whatever information the
urban managers  interface
designers essentially want us to know
about how a city operates and then you
might also have some things like urban
screens these are links which were
installed by alphabet the again formerly
Google to replace all of the payphones
not all of them yet they're still being
rolled out in the more marginal
neighborhoods but in most of Manhattan
you see these big screen kiosks all
around the city so these are all objects
that essentially allow us to interface
with or mediate the smart city for us
and going back to some of those
historical examples I mentioned earlier
there's a long history of building these
little interfere to help us interface
urban intelligence so you have people
like Ottalay whom I mentioned earlier
who was really fascinated with the index
card so the index cards if we say data
is the new oil index cards for Ottolay was the
new oil they were gonna power economies
and all kinds of scientific discoveries
and they scaled up into architectures
exhibitions so a lot of these World's
Fairs in particular which is one another
area of thing I've looked at in
searches a lot of the World's Fairs in
the late 19th to the early to the mid
20th century really looked at the power
of these tiny small moving bits of
information either digital data or
analog data to really revolutionize the
world so I have a couple examples of
here of how these different world Expos
which is where as you probably know
different countries of the world come
together to show their cultural prowess
and their technological developments and
in many cases throughout that long
period of history it's the small moving
bits of information that were kind of a
foundational principle for all the grand
new things you're gonna make in the
world
so as we Ottolay the the index card
built into these with which he
demonstrated in all of these world Expos
we're going to necessitate new
furnishings which would inform require
new cities again outlay partnered with
Le Corbusier to design this city in
Montreal this world city and they would
connect all of the world in these lovely
new networks of knowledge sharing if we
look at the 1939 World's Fair which this
is the pylon and and I forget what the
name of the other thing is the well the
the two figures the sphere and the the
truth the two signal army the obelisk
yes okay so this is from this this is on
Flushing Meadows in New York so again
here we see a lots of people exhibiting
new bits of information and how they're
going to be incredibly revolutionary so
we have exhibitors like AT&T showing a
lot of their new technologies including
the voter as you see in the middle maps
of like network infrastructures we have
companies like Remington Rand who
started off making rifles then moved
into typewriters and now they do all
kinds of weird logistics stuff but they
were showing all of their new modes of
organizing paperwork so they put on
display the indexing systems they had
for people to organize information so
you can see here this is actually a
World's Fair exhibit looking at office
work probably doesn't sound super
exciting to you but this is what they
just feel like this is the future of
efficient urban administration you know
women who are using standardized forms
envelopes on standardized size -
which make our cities move more
efficiently and make world peace in the
end to make a big leap in logic so
Reming this is another slide from my
Remington Ran from some archival
research i did they also showed for how
photography they were really pushing
micro photography which was the
archiving time of a thing of the day now
we want to digitize everything to make
it ever you know present for the entire
history of humanity which as you
probably know is not true the digital
record is incredibly fragile and fickle
but here they were proposing micro
photography like microfiche and
microfilm i don't know how old all of
you are but i am sad for you that you do
not have the pleasure of scrolling
through microfilm and microfiche in the
library it's a beautiful thing
aesthetically and it's just so
delightfully frustrating then it kind of
makes you appreciate nobody's laughing
but i this is hysterical of people who
know what we're talking about but they
were proposing micro photography if you
could just take pictures of everything
everything in the world and make it
really really tiny you could fit all the
world's information on these tiny little
cards of smushed up images so micro
photography small bits of information
again was one of their proposed
solutions that we skip forward to the
1964 World's Fair where you see this big
kind of iconic sculpture which any of if
any of you have been to Flushing Meadow
where the Queen's museum this is still
there today IBM was one of the big
signature exhibitors there and they had
what their their exhibit was made to
look like the tight ball of a typewriter
essentially and once you get inside
Charles and Ray Eames designed a lot of
the exhibits there and they really
played on the idea of kind of multiple
screens tiny bits of information not
always making sense or gelling but just
the power of the flow of information of
tiny bits of knowledge kind of coming at
you this was the future that we had to
prepare ourselves for other other
exhibitors like NCR which dealt with
like cash registers a lot of the bling
that you would take away from the fair
we're like hey look at this cool print
out or put in your birthday we'll give
you a little printout
receipt who has your birthday
or take home this souvenir punch card
for instance so these tiny bits of data
where things that you would take home
with you as a symbol of you know the new
material culture of new bits of
information that we're again gonna
revolutionize the world this is an
example of some of the punch cards you
would take as you can see at the top
this is certain of significant events
that might have happened on your birth
date and then all those little bits of
information would add up to a new
revolutionary future if you go through
the Futurama exhibit for instance you
would see progress land a world the kind
of fantastical architecture of amazing
structural engineering I didn't include
some of these pictures but a lot of them
showed we know people living on the moon
people living under oceans us colonizing
jungles and inhospitable landscapes and
all of this would be in part fueled by
all this new data that we were
generating so the little scales up to
the big another tiny piece of
information specifically about design
I've been interested in is the history
of in the contemporary culture of genes
and architectural publications so around
the mid 2000s to the 2010s or so there
were a whole bunch of exhibits and
projects with people Catalan both making
and cataloging design scenes part of
that was because of the economy of the
time there wasn't a whole lot of there
weren't a whole lot of commissions so if
you could have built buildings you built
new kind of architected publications a
lot of people making scenes around this
time and in precursor times really
looked at the act of making small
publications as if for an architectural
form itself you didn't just create a
standard book you're really experimented
with the structure of the publication so
this was a project I did looking at a
couple related exhibits that happened
not only in New York but traveled around
the world
one was called clicks clip stamp fold
organized by Beatrice columnena
chronicling architectures eens and tiny
magazines from the 1960s I believe up
through the contemporary day and now the
one was called a fusienes
another exhibit of architectural like
material publications and then the last
one was happened at storefront for art and
architecture that was all about the
explosion of blogging culture and
architecture in the late 2000s so what
they did there I think I have a picture
of it on the right here you can see they
had to somehow make that material too so
they took all these really new
architecture blogs at the time like
building blog and I know that Jeff Mahin
is gonna come in here in the spring
right and other people like pruned and
maybe Zegers work I'm not sure if she's
ever been here she had a blog called
loud paper so they made it into exhibit
by printing out those tiny little pieces
of journalism and putting them on the
wall and then having a big event where
all of the big bloggers of the day came
together so looking at how these new
tiny pieces of architectural discourse
either material in the form of
publications even this digital age
there was this huge resurgence of making
physical things to read architecting
actual publications or the rise of
blogging culture how these tiny forms of
discourse would revolutionize the
culture just another one archzines
which I've also reviewed this one
travelled around quite a bit this was a
very international collection of
publications this is just a side note or
I guess you could say a footnote a
related project I did was I edited a
collection about the history and of
lists and notes which again might sound
super boring but I like looks looking
and incredibly boring bureaucratic
things I guess so we had looked at the
history of note-taking in the history of
the commonplace book looked at new
note-taking software and how that
structures the way we think about things
like how does Evernote or how does
taking voice notes on your phone
structure the way you think about
breaking your world and your memorable
parts of your day into bits and then I
also got a curator from the smithsonian
Liza Kerwin who had just organized a big
traveling exhibit about artists notes
and lists that they collected from the
archives and she
included a few pieces and then Lisa
Gilman a media historian is really
interested like me in boring
administrative things so she looked at
the history of technologies of
attachment so the little paper clip that
we now click on her on our email or
whatever now to say attach she wanted to
say like where did that form come from
so she did all this interesting archival
research to see the historical forms of
paper attachment and when we scale up
from the card or the file another thing
I'm interested in is kind of systems for
keeping records this is a really great
library in Brooklyn called the
reanimation library which is essentially
a library of misfit books this artist
slash librarian named Andrew Bacome goes
around to yard sales swap meets the days
the library the library sales where they
get rid of all of their outmoded books
he buys the knowledge that nobody wants
anymore because it's essentially saying
that this is really great intellectual
history we can learn a lot about the
history of graphic design how knowledge
has evolved by collecting old text books
about physics or health or cook books
with the jell-o molds from the 1970s and
nobody makes anymore there's a lot to
learn about culture in intellectual
history through these old books that
don't really have factually accurate
stuff in them anymore and he invites
writers and artists to come and find
these weird books and in their
collections and make stuff out of them
so I wrote a piece looking I read my
piece starts by saying this book was so
boring I had to walk laps on my roof to
keep myself awake while I read it but
it's a betraying manual for secretaries
for how to how to organize records
but some of those beautiful design
things came out of it like some of these
are some of the graphics in there the
fact that filing is this supposedly
exciting aestheticized thing we all these
colors and you can buy these really
great little shiny stars and tabs and
put in your files to make it exciting
and findable look at these beautiful
machines too like you can put a hole
through there's a kind of a lineup of
holes that you might be a particular
category of car you stick your spear on
needle through them and it pulls up only
those cards that relate to that
particular category and then you have
different types of files beautiful
furniture that the whole scene generated
as well so again scaling up from the
tiny bits of information to the to the
more macro scale stuff a lot of this
work is also informed by one of my
favorite classes to teach is a graduate
seminar called data archive
infrastructure where we look at the
history politics aesthetics of
organizing information everything from
the history of classification systems to
would you do for performative cultures
that really may be our text base like
indigenous cultures how do you archive
ephemeral media like sound art or all
kinds of interesting stuff tons of
artists have been in have been inspired
by the archive in their work so we look
at a lot of that kind of work too so all
my class websites are available online
if you want to look at any of the
readings or see what we do so these are
all linked to through my website I'm
just going back to the scale of
furniture this is a longer-term project
I did that I've started at a fellowship
in Germany a couple years ago about
intellectual furnishings or cabinet
logics so how the furniture we design
shapes the way we compartmentalize the
world and interact with media so a
couple of those examples are one of the
one of the piece that that mark alluded
to published in the Harvard design
magazine last fall without the history
of the shelf this is such a nondescript
who cares kind of piece of furniture
especially the Billy shelf that you just
worked to death until it breaks and then
put out on your stoop but these are in
an incredibly important infrastructure
that has organized our life for since
Neolithic times really so I look at kind
of that long history also looking at all
the Airlie other interesting machines
and shelving devices organizing devices
people have designed to store and
facilitate our access to media the book
wheel you don't want to just read one
book you know now we have the iPad that
you can take on vacation with you and
have 20 books why would you bother if
you could have a book wheel in your
living room where you could read 20
books at the same time
when books were very precious you know
often hand hand-copied they're really
expensive it's not everybody was you
couldn't check them out of the library
so they literally chained them to the
shelves as some of you might know and
then that informed all kinds of really
fantastic new architectures like Labrus
libraries for instance really taking
advantage of the rise of accessible
books new steel forms of architecture
and really creating the library the
grand library that we know of today
continuing that on until the mid century
when you had certain things like the
radios and television centers entering
people's homes bringing new both
exciting and scary technologies if I can
see through that glass eye out to the
world can the world see into my living
room too so George Nelson and other
really well-known designers created
furnishings to help people
compartmentalize their media and
sometimes shut the door on it when you
didn't want it spying on your family's
dinner for instance um then you have
like dieter Rams 606 shelving which kind
of float this is this is about ten times
as expensive as this stuff it's like
your IKEA shelf for instance but this
levity UPS of some of you might have
seen that dieter Rams in person but it's
a very expensive and quiet kind of high
modern I think that's supposed to make
the the stuff of your life kind of just
float off the ground essentially and
then we have in a new logic of shielding
with like the IKEA store room where your
books and your DVDs which we don't
really watch anymore
other media things might be stored next
to socks or marshmallows just because
people tend to buy those things together
so size that you have a biology section
and then the George Orwell section of
it's not organized by human intelligible
logic it's organized by logistics and
purchasing behaviors so new shelving
is accommodating new ways of
thinking about the world another project
I did with some architects and product
designers at Parsons was most cities
have this your library system probably
has library service for incarcerated
people who cannot go to their own public
library they will take a collection of
books into
the correctional facilities the
librarians in New York who do that and
several of their many correction
facilities we're using lunch carts with
broken wheels and as you probably know
prisons are not the most kind of
well-kept facilities they have uneven
floors it was really difficult for them
to do a very stressful job so we all did
a shift of library service in one of the
correctional facilities and then the
architects and product designers worked
with the librarians to design what they
thought would be the most functional
library cart to dignify their work and
make it easier to do and I know you
might think pink is very stereotypical
but the women in the women's prison
specifically asked for a pink cart to
kind of I don't know no I'm going to
gender stereotypes here but it's kind of
obviously gender stereotyped but this is
a really a meaningful project for a lot
of the students involved and I have been
scaled up from furniture to look at the
closet again another thing that who
thinks to study this kind of stuff well
I do apparently so looking at the
history of starting off with the premise
that if I look into my closet right now
one entire shelf is dedicated to my old
time capsules old hard drives that I
don't really want to do away with floppy
disks I don't even have the ports to
access anymore
cables from like you know I just got a
new iMac and all of my old cables became
obsolete so I have boxes of this stuff
so it's a it's a graveyard for old media
essentially so looking at the the how we
can kind of psychologize the closet to
see what kind of things we store and how
we organize it looking at examples of
kind of when the closet was actually a
fancy private room essentially the
closet came to be a more private thing
over the course of time in looking at
like a lot of George Nelson storage wall
how he had actually had closets built
into it and then here's an example of
like a closet full of all of these old
media that you just don't either don't
know what to do with don't know how to
responsibly discard with or because of
data security you don't really want to
give your old hard drive over to a
recycling facility because who knows
who's gonna read that stuff so there all
kinds of kind of worries or phobias
that might keep us preserving these
dead things there are lots of artists
who actually work with some of these
ideas I wrote a piece for a volume a
couple years ago about the artist - Zoe
Bella who plays with the furniture of
office work essentially and she's
drawing on the some of you might know
the research of Frank and Lillian
Gilbreth who in the early 20th century
really wanted to make office workers
much more efficient to use their do
their paper work more efficiently so
they would use like early forms of
motion pictures attached lights to
people's fingers and ask women to stuff
envelopes or file folders and take
movies of them to see the light with the
light show that essentially kind of
emerged from that so they could make
prescribed more efficient gestures to
make people stuff envelopes faster I
was gonna say elephants laughs stuff
envelopes faster or to do paperwork
faster this again it was gonna make
people more money make the world more
efficient these movement of small moving
parts of information I will also work
with some product designers furniture
designers at Parsons to do a class based
project and exhibit called furnishing
the cloud where they were considering
what are the what's the ergonomics of
new media what kind of furniture do we
need in an era when we're usually
lounging reading iPads or phones what
furniture look like in this new age so
they just made a lot of kind of
cardboard based mock-ups but this was an
exhibit that was up for a few weeks just
a couple weeks ago on E-flux I published
a thing about tables in and furniture of
Silicon Valley so you might have seen
the kind of crazy video that Facebook
put out to celebrate its one millionth
or billionth user called chairs or like
Facebook so I kind of took that
literally and looked at the the
furniture of Silicon Valley because you
know there's been a lot of controversy
about sexism and the disregard for
marginalized people in Silicon Valley so
I wanted to see how their workplaces are
structured and how those this facilities
people are given to do that work might
contribute to the way they do their work
and the way they interact with each
other
so this for example Danish furniture is
a really big thing as it is pretty much
everywhere so you have like 
making your papa bear chairs which when
you had a terrible day at facebook you
can go and the chair can hug away your
pain
this is Evernote's where they have the
chalkboard wall and again more Danish
furniture is the shell chair and what do
you think this is on the right it's the
new Apple head which is like
oppressive minimalism so there's no joy
here your the joy is outside in the nature
Park that you can actually access I
guess until you I think that you can go
in the in the interior part of the
doughnut and access the the nature but
so a lot of this work is informed again
by artists who have played with these
ideas like Doris Salcido who does a lot
with loss and genocide and how furniture
is a way to kind of contain memories so
she takes like these cabinets which if
you know Bachelard it's all about
opening up the cabinet and smelling the
raisins and having memories flood out to
you here they're stuffed with concrete
so what does that say about like the
pain of memories and kind of a culture
that has been gripped with genocide and
so she's one artist who's been really
inspirational to me and then Allen
Wexler who's really playful he's an
architect and furniture designer who
really when he designs like a kitchen
for instance he'll say like what is the
essence of kitcheness  let's forget all
the appliances you can buy the fact that
you know we have modularized cupboards
we can buy what do I need to do in a
kitchen and this kind of goes back to
our discussion Mike about your
renovating your home and the fact that
your kitchen is right now across five
different rooms of your house maybe you
like it that way maybe you don't but
he's asking these kinds of questions
about the basic ontological needs of a
function like what does it mean to sleep
what does it mean to eat together with
people and how can we rethink the
fundamental typeology of chairs and
tables and furniture that will
facilitate that stuff okay that was the
longest section the next one is
media architectures and here we've
looked at the Apple interior this is the
what the building looks like from the
outside so if we scale up from furniture
how did these shape
the scale of architecture so a couple of
the projects I did this was a little
while ago when the new CCTV building
open the REM the OMA building in Beijing
and time for the Olympics I looked at
that and how it kind of reflects the
public relations stunts of a state
driven television corporation kind of
broadcasting its prowess to the world
and this is Frank Gehry's IAC building
which is a whole hodgepodge of different
media companies like match.com and a
bunch of other random websites and how
this kind of reflects this crystalline
fluidity of what the new media economy
is supposed to be but if you look at the
outside it's quite different from the
weird floorplan you get on the inside
and imagine being the person who has to
like work in a little point and you
can't really roll your roller chair
around anywhere or the fact that you
know yes you might get lovely tropical
candy colored spikes divider screens but
you're still in cubicles so there's not
a whole lot of radicalism from the
outside that transfers to the interior
I've also done a lot of work on
libraries so my and then fortunately
been asked by different schools and
cities who have been designing libraries
to go and talk to them about some of the
things I've studied so you just example
this is something I presented it Pratt
and Yale and the big academic librarians
conference the big national academic
librarians conference this one is the
thing I presented Smith they just hired
what's the woman who did the Vietnam
Memorial I'm blanking on her name Maya
Lin is designing their new library
everybody knows that one apparently so
she's designing the new library so they
asked me to go in talking about things I
had seen they might want to think about
but it all started with my dissertation
over 15 years ago where I was actually
there for the design kind of death no
graphic research on the design of the
OMA is Seattle Public Library which was
some people regard like the building of
the decade really revolutionized how
people would access information and how
architecture could give shape to
information so that's kind of where a
lot of this interest started this one if
you subscribe to any architecture blogs
you probably seen this 5,000 times in
the
last week I don't really know what I
think about it you know most of those
books aren't really books or just
painted on the walls there's no way to
reach a lot of those so I'm a little
anti this design I would have to write
something to figure out what I think
about it but it's definitely circulating
in all of the design world this past
week or so another project I did was I'm
really interested in kind of niche
collections you probably tell him into
lots of niche things but this was a 2006
the there's very few total designs by
Alvar Aalto in the United States one of
which is his poet Woodbury poetry room
at Harvard in its Lamont library it's
undergraduate library in 2006 over the
summer this is how the story goes the
librarians did a stealth renovation
without really talking to the people in
the Graduate School of Design which of
course as you can imagine did not go
over well so I wanted to look at the
history of the build but I just loved
the idea of a library dedicated solely
to poetry and what would that mean and
it specifically in an undergrad library
I wanted to make undergrads really get
into poetry so I looked at how their
chat books and records and all kinds of
media forms in this space and how they
build the the room itself was designed
to accommodate all these different types
of activity so these are some renderings
from the art tech archives a just some
images from the time the building opened
by serving Robinson really well-known
architectural photographer who I was
able to talk to about his work with this
project this is from 1949 when records
were the new media and so they have
these huge four of these huge record
players that are octagonal where if you
bring your class in eight of you can sit
around a record player and listen to a
recording of a poet reading his or her
own work together and that was kind of
an interesting very revolutionary
pedagogical tool the room is also
modularizable it's mean this stuff is
meant to move around so it can be not
only a space of learning but a space of
production so when you listen to other
people's work you read their checkbooks
you look through their archives then you
can move the tables around and actually
have a workshop of you producing your
own work so it's a generative
- and these are just a two-act -
examples of different public events that
are happening there I've also looked at
the 40th anniversary of Louis Kahn's
Exeter library which was really designed
with the module of the book to be
central all of these kind of
mythological classical forms of circles
and squares etc and the rectangular
shape of the book how does a building
like this allow itself to be updated for
an era of networks was essentially what
I was asking and some of them are really
kind of awkward wires running
all across the floor and it looks a
little awkward to see a big bank of
computers next to the the card catalog
which at least when I was there was
still there not used it was kind of a
monument monumental furniture to an old
age of information it was kind of
harkening back to the age of Otley just
some interior spaces the carols this is
a private resident residential school as
you might know Exeter Academy and just
the way students really personalize
their carols I don't know that there's
not really a carol culture in university
libraries anymore is there
does anybody have a Carol do you even
know what I'm talking about
Wow microfiche and Carol's are two
things you guys are missing out on but
but the students have their own private
study spaces they kind of decorate them
like their dorm rooms and personalize
these kind of information spaces for
themselves another a project from about
a decade ago with this new audio-visual
library for the entire state or the
entire country of the Netherlands where
they have taken stills from a lot of
their state television and state film
production and essentially baked them
into glass and made that the facade of
the building so in a way it's kind of
old media its stained glass which in
preliterate cultures was the way you
would communicate biblical stories to
people in a church but it's made for a
digital kind of post post electronic
media age and it's kind of also
interesting the archives of the
subterranean space with this very
ominous orange glow like it's almost the
archives are Hades in a way I'm not
quite sure if that's the effect they
were going for but there is a kind of a
interesting simple symbolic nature to
putting the Ark
in this orange light below ground and
these these projects are informed by a
couple other classes I teach one is a
course on median architecture where we
look at the whole history we start with
like digital forms and move backwards in
time to see how different media
technologies have informed architecture
all the way back to rural culture and
then another class on sound and space
because I'm really interested in
thinking about beyond the visual that
the media are tactile and sonic and
spaces have all these senses too and how
they we should think about things in a
multi-sensorial way I'm gonna skip over
some because I am going way too I am
speaking way too much about each of
these but scaling up from architecture
further is another I mean I think some
of the the pieces that Jason sent around
indicate that I do a little work on
infrastructure so the value of thinking
about certain types of architectures
like libraries as infrastructures as a
piece that I wrote and then I looked at
some of those logistical infrastructures
so I tracked the system behind the
scenes by which meteor transferred among
the 200-plus branch libraries in New
York City which was a really interesting
kind of almost FedEx like logistical
treasure hunt I guess you could say and
then there are really interesting
archives it actually exists in
decommissioned mines underground which
were salt mines limestone mines because
they have such a cool controllable
climates they become the perfect place
for Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox
and Corbis the image cut people to
actually keep their over their original
copies of their films their silent films
their nitrate film and they're big
they're being used more for data centers
- so these subterranean places of
extraction are being used for
preservation of media - and this is
going to come out with new geographies
the Harvard Graduate School of Design
magazine in a couple weeks
one thing I promise just on Tuesday was
about another kind of esoteric archive
and that is the archives of climate
science we think that climate science is
this very heavily data-driven thing and
it is but to get data science before 150
years ago
you can't rely on readings people
weren't taking or recording regularly
weather readings instead they have to
use proxies material proxies ice cores
sediment samples rocks so when you
decide whether Yucca Mountain is an
appropriate site for storing nuclear
waste for instance you have just
listened to the rocks tell you about how
they were going to keep their secrets
keep your secrets inside essentially so
this was a project as I said just came
out a couple days ago another tiny
libraries this is kind of passe now I
don't know if they were big maybe five
or six years ago where you lived but the
whole little library movement maybe they
still are not sure they were ubiquitous
annoyingly so in New York about five or
six years ago but they also have some
really interesting kind of parallel
projects like the fact that the people's
library was a central part of the of
Zuccotti Park the stuff that was
happening in in New York in 2011 and
then architects like developing
interesting modular public space type
libraries and how you might make these
important puppets for people to reclaim
for a temporary period public space for
epistemological purposes so slashed the
next-to-last is media cities and I've
already talked about a lot of these kind
of previewed at the very beginning some
of the work I've done on smart cities in
particular but looking again at the fact
that there is a history to them I talked
a bit about how all the World's Fairs
tried out all these new analog forms of
small moving parts that would shape more
efficient cities also looked at historic
infrastructures this is like our pre
Wi-Fi days I'm not sure if if Knoxville
has a history of this but lots of cities
had a hit of pneumatic tubes running
underneath the streets that were used in
in mail delivery some of which have been
repurposed for threading through
fiber-optic cables so this layering of
hiss of and old infrastructures I'll
skip over this one a lot of city this is
all the city scale projects I wanted to
see also what people in other parts of
the world are doing this you might know
Korea South Korea prides itself on being
one of the most technologically advanced
countries but about 10 15 years ago they
they some particularly in the publishing
world were very concerned by the
breakneck speed of development both
urban development which produced a lot
of disasters like collapse shopping
malls and other things that were based
on full faulty construction and the fact
that they were losing their long
tradition of printing Korea and China
were printing well before the Gutenberg
developed the printing press so they
lamented the loss of this culture so a
lot of the big printers the the
high-caliber literary presses and art
presses moved out of Seoul moved north
about 30 miles so that didn't - right
near the Demilitarized Zone and made an
architectural showcase called pi2 book
city they had a whole bunch of
well-known architects develop signature
buildings than all these publishers
inhabited so they had this a little
enclave of publishing near the DMZ in
this then the rice marshes north of the
city of Seoul so this is kind of a
counter to this it's a form of
intelligence that's a counter to this
smart city that's happening 30 miles to
the south mark also mentioned this piece
I wrote where I'm kind of pushing
against the idea of smart cities called
the city is not a computer what's lost
and we think about the city is an
information processing machine and
that's also the premise for a studio I
teach in the spring called urban
intelligence where students get into
groups and think about other ways that
places can be smart that isn't just
about the branded proprietary
algorithmic way of digging about
smartness today I'm also looking at how
public's and cities can be smart so I've
looked at the importance of public data
map libraries all these ways the people
everyday citizens can get forms of
spatial urban intelligence that make
them smart citizens to counteract kind
of the proprietary surveillance nature
of a lot of smart urbanism and the final
part mapping across scale so there was
kind of it you can see this image kind
of translating into this last section
where all this work I hope you see how
one nest to the other the tiny piece
becomes a filing system becomes a piece
of furniture becomes an architecture
kind of scales up to a city it's not
causal it just may be like a formal
residence that goes across them and
won't made a baby think about these is
by through the method
of napping and that's something that I
wrote one of my tiny book about it's
also the subject of a class I teach
every fall a studio called Maps is media
where we look at the history politics
aesthetics of mapping and again just as
I said before I really like to think
beyond the visual so I'm really
encouraging both in my own work and my
students work to think about the fact
that knowledge isn't only cognitive and
seeing stuff it's also hearing and
touching and experiencing and embodied
way so reinforcing the value of
multi-sensorial and effective mapping
and this is a piece that came out about
six weeks ago I guess looking first of
all at all the new amazingly
revolutionary things that are happening
in mapping thanks to machine
intelligence and neural nets and
self-driving cars which I don't find I
don't find the cars very interesting at
all but the stuff they're doing with
sense in the world is really interesting
and how that can be applied to human
concerns like human rights and
development and disaster preparedness
but also what's left out what other
forms of intelligence are left out of
machine intelligence indigenous
intelligences the ways that Polynesian
cultures for instance navigate the Seas
and had for thousands of years it's
based on feelings swells of waves
actually reflect back from nearby ocean
nearby islands so just as you know lidar
and radar are based on reverberation
the way Pacific Islanders are actually
dealing with navigating huge expanses of
sea are also based on a very analog form
of reverberation or reflection and then
other species too especially if you want
to think about climate change we have to
should understand how animals sense
space other species and think about how
they have a cartographic sensibility -
monkeys have been shown to think about
space in both Euclidean and non
Euclidean ways so there's a really
interesting spatial sensibility there to
think through so this is just repeating
some of what I said earlier about
machine vision these are all the
interlocking forward frame around
forward and backward framing mirrors on
a Tesla for instance and this is using
machine vision to identify kind of
particular features in a landscape so
that development organizations or
officials can actually know where to
target their
services and these are some examples of
some of the more indigenously informed
other species types of projects and
community mapping to which really gets
at those other intelligences that aren't
easily machined a lot of my students
then it's how do you make a map that
incorporates all this stuff so one of my
students often want to do is create one
map that has it all which is impossible
so instead we encourage them to make it
Atlas so to have different components
making different arguments and in
concert they're all kind of route
informing reflecting one another so this
is an example of a project on urban
renewal looking at policies and the
consequences of different policies ever
been a renewal by a student Jakob
Winkler and you can see he's dealing
with time and different forms of
legislation and mapping kind of the the
presence of particular features in the
urban landscape Heming Zhang was
thinking about what walkability is you
probably know that walkability according
to the Yongle school has a score you can
give a number to a neighborhood based on
how walkable it is she thinks this is
really reductive particularly in
Chinatown in New York where so much of
the culture happens in unofficial ways
on the streets does she wanted to find
new ways using ethnographic research
interesting forms of qualitative mapping
that really reflected the richness of
street culture and walkability so her
map incorporates her Atlas incorporates
all these different ways of mapping
together and even beyond the math
there's a way for you to go out into the
world and kind of map and experientially
so I did a piece a few years ago about
infrastructural tourism about I don't
know if this is popular here but it
hasn't been in New York like let's go
take a field trip to the container port
or let's go down into the sewer or let's
go visit data centers so people want to
know how their infrastructure works so
actually going and experiencing and
smelling and feeling the friction in
these places an integral part to
understanding how our hidden
infrastructures work and there are lots
of artists and designers who have done
work in that area
the follow-up piece was called cloud and
field and that's looking at extreme
tourism where you have people like the
unknown fields division who will take
you if you can pay them $3,000 they will
take you to the Alta common Salt Flats
and Chile
or up to the North Pole where there's a
huge array of satellites so you can
experience the frigid e the extreme
landscapes of these kind of often
military or secret logistical supply
chains that make our cellphones or that
make ours make our cell networks work
and people like Ingrid Barrington and
created field guides to these as well so
trying to take these inscrutable
networks that are urban but also wit go
way beyond the urban scale and give us a
little thing to think with going back to
the index card maybe to help us try to
make sense together where the internet
lives or where cell phone infrastructure
lives drawing connections and I because
I'm looking at field guides I really dug
into the history of bird-watching and
the history of whole history the field
got itself The Naturalist field guide so
the challenges of scaling up from the
small index to comprehend vast
geographies is really what that piece
and I guess my work as a whole is really
looking at and this is another example
there's a group a speculative design
group in London called super flux who
made a drone aviary like a field guide
to drones so if you look at different
drones almost like a bird guide you know
drones do kind of look like birds how
could you look at the typology and
identify different kinds of drones and
then how do you scale up from that to
understand a vast geography like the
Internet this is how we typically
represent what the internet looks like
another artist I guess designer that I
really drawn inspiration from in a lot
of this mapping work is James Corner
who's very reflexive about the the
technologies ation the fact that the
tools we build the scales we create
really inform the way we see the world
and how we think to measure it so his
work has been very important for me and
in the maps class I teach and I think
it's really important to consider as you
do that scaling up as you go from the
tiny to the big or the big to the tiny
all the epistemological going back to
that early mouthful of the word it's at
the very beginning ethical and political
implications of that rescaling who's
left out who's included
and I'll close with one artist who I
think is probably one of my favorite
artists of all time who really embodies
a lot of these interests is anyone
familiar with the work of Ann Hamilton
okay so she's new to all of you that's
good or most of you I think so she deals
a lot she's an installation artist deals
a lot with the idea of memory and the
archive and embodied labor marginalized
cultures and this is the piece that I
took there was in the Park Avenue Armory
a huge cavernous space in New York that
happened about three or four years ago
and I took my archives class there to
visit it and it's um going back to the
previous slide showing birds birds were
an integral part of this exhibition so
these are pigeons hearkening to carrier
pigeons so there's a whole mix of media
formats she's kind of incorporating at
all of her installations different forms
of archival materiality so we have the
bird animals horses and birds in
particular have been integral parts of
human communication throughout history
rely on them to transfer our messages
for us and then you can trace that with
a text somebody reading this kind of
live gender algorithmically generated
text so it's old and new media together
this is the space as a whole a huge
curtain was strung up and you could
sit on these swings and as you
swung on the swings you would generate a
breeze to actually move the curtain you
might think I'm out of reading too much
into the symbolism but it is in a way
this is an evocative of the breath the
voice and the power that like one little
breeze can have when it's collectively
captured together can move this huge
piece of fabric in the middle of the
room all kinds of media formats again as
I said before birds and text these
little bags are full of radios of kind
of live generated audio this is a live
making of a record based on the sound in
the room and then these are people like
erasing text at the same time so
recognizing as we're capturing and
memorializing it's also important thing
about what needs to be erased or
forgotten too so her work is really
complicated and poetic and very
multi-sensory but I think it really
captures a lot of these issues of scale
and what's worth knowing and how the
physical world actually gives shape to
what we know and can know and should
know this is just a little collage of a
lot of her work you see here
even clothing she thinks a fabric in the
history of embroidery of weaving of of
ink Braille text over there on the left
making and unmaking of books all of
these are kind of brought together in
her work the both the the big sorry the
tiny often scaling up to the big and
that's all I have so thank you
sure if anybody has questions or
comments I'm happy to take some
Oh over here sorry yes I think I had
moved all these hands pointing and I'm
just following the Train of hands okay
okay
that's a very good question and I have
to teach our research methods class
which I haven't done for about a decade
in the spring so I have to kind of
discipline my own discipline
undisciplined methodology but you I
tried a lot of archival images in here
you might have noticed so some of the
work I do is archival research I do a
lot of interviews a lot of site visits a
lot of ethnographic research so really
it kind of depends upon the project if
it's something I can visit something
that's feasible to visit something where
a company will actually talk to me or
the creator is still alive I think
they're actually going there
experiencing it over a scale of time not
just like one afternoon to see what it
feels like in different times and
seasons talking to the people involved
so incorporating I don't do quantitative
methods very much although I'm
critiquing through a lot of my data
driven projects I'm often critiquing
quantitative methods but content
analysis is not really something I do
but it's mostly a mix of qualitative and
ethnographic based methods in archival
research
how do I personally deal with them
well there are a couple different fronts
I mean one of the projects I kind of
skipped through really quickly was the
one called public information I'm
looking at how if people are going to be
living in an era of increasing
surveillance and data capture they
should have more data literacy some
statistical literacy I mean a know
talkative recently some undergraduates
that he was at UCLA last week they came
up and said do you think it's a problem
that people don't know how what
statistics you know if you're know
that's in the statistics isn't a
language that everybody speaks yet we
seem to so readily consume facts and
figures so they were asking these you
know freshman psychology majors do you
think everybody should have to learn
statistics and I said that's not a bad
idea I think I'll make a lot of y'all
mad it's a new requirement in your kind
of high school or curriculum or your
freshmen requirements but given the fact
that so much rationale for how policy is
determined how how healthcare is
distributed etc. is driven by data
algorithms determined as I said not only
what shoes you Amazon's gonna show you
but also what in China with their social
score you probably know this I forget
what it's called the social does anybody
know they're talking about China has
essentially given a social kind of
compliance score to everyone now that's
based on your ability to pay your bills
on time they're measuring all kinds of
things that can measure which will
determine essentially whether or not
your kids will get into their top choice
schools whether you will get a mortgage
whether kind of there will be more
oversight as to whether you pay your
bills on time also it's supposed to be
paid public so the the the impetus is
that there'll be social shaming as well
so your be less likely to get a date or
get married if your social score is low
so this is I'm just contributing to the
fear factor here but what I say is
knowing about these things developing
data literacy develop knowing about the
ways too hot to search securely and
privately how to secure your devices is
another important thing maybe going to
live in like the quiet zone of West
Virginia might be another alternative to
weather a note or at Oakridge like you
Google work at Oakridge where apparently
you can't have a cellphone and on the
facility or something that's what I've
heard today but but the opting out
entirely is
to be a really extreme and kind of naive
measure to some people but marshaling
data like the data literacy part and
pushing back developing civic tech is
another thing that some people are
advocating for too so public generated
technology to offer an alternative to or
to push back against a lot of the
corporately defined stuff so those are
just some some options
well there are a couple of different
examples I mean one of them is the fact
that the the data that cities collect
about the efficiency of urban systems
the the metrics they collect have to be
about things that actually lend
themselves to measurement and to data
fication and there are certain things
like public health for instance some
cities will do things like sentiment
analysis they'll look at the people's
tweets in see are they using happy we're
happy things are sad words love many
bitches and doing facial recognition of
your Instagram pictures and seeing if
your smile a machine will see if you're
smiling you're sad and it kind of makes
an effective measure about the city as
to our people and Finland happier or
sadder than people in Uruguay for
instance all kinds of methodological
problems with assumptions like that but
those are the kind of things that don't
really look readily lend themselves to
machine vision or algorithmicization or
quantification or some of those things
that slipped through the data model
itself but if you talk to any archivists
particularly those that work with kind
of marginalized populations indigenous
populations there are things that
sometimes they just won't fit into the
boxes you know I showed you that Thomas
demand picture of all those standardized
gray archival boxes is a backdrop to one
of the slides in a way the size of the
shelve and the scale of the box in some
sense according to Foucault and Derrida
determines what's archivable in a way if
it doesn't fit into a box if it's a a an
ephemeral thing like I don't know a
performative art piece or centrally if
like if your culture is based on
transferring knowledge through dance how
do you capture that in a way that
actually gets at the liveness and
ephemerality of the performance so
archivists are very much sometimes maybe
just working rotely through the
conventions of their profession you know
like this is the box we have what fits
into it what doesn't essentially is
disregarded like we can't take your
collection sir because we don't have the
right size boxes for it
but I think it also promotes kind of
critical reflection on all the stuff
that is maybe meaningful that doesn't
make it into the collection because
it doesn't fit for any number of reasons
Jason
yeah I think I mean I would take a lot
of work to reverse-engineer it but I do
think that's possible I mean if you
looked at the the pieces I was showing
about Paul Outlay the guy who thought
all the work we put on index card so you
could build a bunch of cabinets build a
world city and then you'd have this
networked world of kind of unity and
universal knowledge you could start with
your end goal and that is universal
world harmony and kind of encyclopedic
knowledge the real world around and then
think about there are all kinds of ways
you could operationalize that the
Internet the early days of the internet
they thought they were operationalizing
that Facebook thinks it's
operationalizing that just so happens
that index cards were the new media of
the day in Paul outlays time he thought
he was operationalizing that world
vision through what was the new tech of
the time so I think you can reverse
engineer based on these and big
ambitious principles but what you
reversed the small parts could be a
variety of different things based on
what is new of the day I thought as
often is based on what is new because we
have so much faith in the new often I
could have to think a bit more but
that's an interesting challenge but yeah
the definitely the influence definitely
does go both in both directions
well that's a good question I don't know
if you heard that is the pursuit of an
encyclopedic knowledge worthwhile
yes I think it's useful and this is
maybe not a complete answer but I think
it's useful in part that because it is
such a timeless thing we always run up
to the point where you realize it's
futile but once we have a complicity
Decimal System the Library of Congress
you might know have all these kind of
racial and religious biases into them
the Dewey Decimal System has dedicated a
range of a hundred to root through
religions the world religions 90% of
that is for Christianity 10% of that is
for the rest of the world's religions
you know in the way women section any
form of alternative sexual orientation
was relate as deviance you know so the
coded language every time we hear to
have a universal classification system
or a shelf that will hold everything or
a hard drive I keep getting new
computers because of human eating a
bigger hard drives to store all my PDFs
I am building my own kind of Universal
library in a way but it's few do you
always run up to the futility or the
fact that there's the world changes and
there and your system is kind of locked
into its logistics and it will never
live up to the all ever evolving nature
of changing nature of culture and
knowledge
that is something I need to get better
at asking myself really but it's been
I've been pretty grateful that people in
different disciplines have accepted my
work so I will get invitations from
geographers and a lot of
architecture schools and urban planners
and librarians and archivists so for the
past since I got 10 year I have to say
about 6 years ago which is a very
liberating thing that most of my work
has been driven by Commission's not and
that's not to say get paid but people
will will say intellectual yes
intellectual commission so they'll say
we saw that we liked your work and this
could you please write something about
this bill they won't give me a
prescribed topic they'll say here's the
theme and where can you find a place
where your interests meet that theme so
it's an interesting challenge it's like
you know the value of constraints in a
design project you know if they just say
like design a building and that's your
studio challenge like that is that is
overwhelmingly open you can might be
paralyzed by the possibility so having a
thing to push against or to structure
is really helpful so that's the way most
of the work is done the book that just
came out was research I've been doing
for like 15 years that because I
collected so much work I think I
paralyzed myself by thinking I could
never actually find a systematic way to
write it where all those little articles
I showed you came in the interim they
were great ways to think in little
pieces through that bigger project and
then when I got a fellowship with no
committees thank God for one semester I
was able to write the manuscript in
Germany where everything closes at 5
p.m. anyway Xander the tiny town where I
was there weren't a lot of distractions
so that was a way that that book
happened because I feel like I've
collected all this stuff I've been
thinking about through my classes and a
little parts to these articles this is
something that does have to pull
together into a bigger project but the
articles are often you know where an
invitation meets my
interests yes
yeah definitely and I think it's also
based on you know I mentioned earlier
the whole idea of a lot of students want
to take all these different spatial
knowledge and put them into one map and
you realize like nobody's gonna be able
to read that map because it's gonna have
so much stuff on and so instead think of
it as an atlas with a succession of
things that talk to each other similarly
with this these types of challenges I
think that cross-disciplinary teams can
be really interesting so which is why I
worked with the architecture League of
New York about three or four years ago
on a branch a library design project and
nearly all the teams that were became
finalists had a whole mix of people
there were service designers real estate
people Architects urban planners library
scientists all on the team together so
their ways of thinking about designing
knowledge in space in informing one
another there was another part I went
into another half of that there's my
response to your question but I can't
remember it so I think like
collaboration can be really helpful and
then yeah I forget the other the other
part that's a half useful response I
hope at least yeah
okay thanks for having me
