mattern scms2012 infrastructure

8/2/2019 Mattern SCMS2012 Infrastructure

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Shannon Mattern | The New School

Deep Time ofMediaInfrastructure

Athanasius Kircher, MusurgiaUniversalis, 1650


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Seattle Public Library Book Spiral


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Week 1: Interface Space

Week 2: Open Office: TheDigital Workplace

Week 3: Boxed In: TelevisualSpace

Week 4: Radio City: Sound andSpace

Week 5: Mise-en-Scene:Cinematic Spaces

Week 6: Iconic Images:Architecture and Photography

Week 7: Le Corbusier: Designeras Media Maven

Week 8: Circulation:Newspapers, Plans Books,Critical Journals, DesignMagazines

Week 9: Books & Buildings:Print and Architecture

Week 10: Inscribed Space:Drawing and Architecture


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William Henry Fox Talbot:West Front, York Minster,

from Lendal Street, ca. 1845Berenice Abbott:Newsstand, 32nd Street and ThirdAvenue, Manhattan, 1935


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Charles Marville, Rue Basse-des-Ursins, le de la Cit, 1865;The Piercing of the Avenue de lOpra, 1865


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Charles Marville, Rue de Rivoli, 1877


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Adolf Loos, Villa Mller, Prague, 1930


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S. Eisenstein, Montage and Architecture, 1938


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Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas Studio, 1968


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Inception, 2010


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Levittown, PA


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has been underway at least since the

development of technological images in thecontext of urban modernization in the mid-19thcentury (Scott McQuire, The Media City, 2008, p. vii)

from the hand-held camera at the end of the19th century to the mobile phone at the end of

the 20th, the city has always been a mediatedconstruct(Eric Gordon, The Urban Spectator, 2010, p. 2)


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Serlio, Primo Libro, 1551; Paju Book City, South Korea, under construction


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the study of thecyclically recurringelements and motivesunderlying and guiding

the development ofmedia culture

(Erkki Huhtamo, FromKaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes

Toward an Archaeology of the Media

Leonardo 30:3 (1997): 223)


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Via http://bit.ly/GFclmm


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Via longnow.org

1. The Long Now


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Via igic.org

2. Palimpsests


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Harvard GSD, Landscape Futures


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formed in the past, butstill active in the

cultural process, not only and often not at all asan element of the past, but as an effectiveelement of the present (Raymond Williams)

new technologies do not simply destroy olderforms of communication but call into being newmobilities and sometimes intensify older ones(Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin)

the entanglement, the intermingling, the chiasmof pasts and presents(Christopher Witmore)


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Via Cisco

3. Networked, Contextual Histories


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concept of an information infrastructure[for instance]highlights the fact that the

transmission of information has long beencoordinated by a constellation of institutions,

rather than by a single government agency orbusiness firm

(Richard R. John, Recasting the Information Infrastructure for theIndustrial Age In Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. & James W. Cortada, A

Nation Transformed: How Information Has Shaped the United Statesfrom Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000): 56)


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A city...is not a flattenablegraph. In a city, networks

overlap upon other networks

(Friedrich Kittler,The City is a

Medium,New Literary History27:4

(1996): 719)


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Via Cisco


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DML Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition


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[T]he eventual growth of complex infrastructureand the forms it takes are the result of converginghistories, path dependencies, serendipity, innovation,

and bricolage (tinkering). Speaking ofcyberinfrastructure as a machine to be built or atechnical system to be designed tends to downplay

the importance of social, institutional,organizational, legal, cultural, and other non-technical problems developers always face.

(Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, Geoffrey C. Bowker & Cory P. Knobel,

Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tension, and Design. Report of aWorkshop on History & Theory of Infrastructure: Lessons for New ScientificCyberinfrastructures, University of Michigan, January 2007): pp. 6-7).


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[N]ew infrastructures do not so muchsupercede old ones as ride on top of them,forming physical and organizational

palimpseststelephone lines follow railwaylines, and over time these pathways have notbeen diffused, but rather etched moredeeply into the urban landscape

(Kazys Varnelis, The Centripetal City: Telecommunications, the

Internet, and the Shaping of the Modern Urban EnvironmentCabinet17 (Spring 2004/5): 27-8)

4. Path Dependency


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Telegraph Wires + Train Tracks;Fiber Optic Cables in Parisian Sewers


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there are very close physical parallels and

synergies between the development and

routing of telecommunications networkswithin and between cities and the patterns ofother infrastructures. Because of the costs

of developing new telecommunications

networks, all efforts are made to string opticfibres through water, gas and sewage ducts;between cities existing railway, road, and

waterway routes are often used.(Stephen Graham & Simon Marvin, Telecommunications and theCity: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places (New York: Routledge, 1996):329).


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Via NPS.gov, ElectronicDeviceRetrieval.com

5. Material Evidence


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6. People as Infrastructure


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7. Informal/Shadow Infrastructures

Via landonbonebaker.com


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8. Scale


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Since infrastructures are incremental andmodular, they are always constructed in manyplaces (the local), combined and recombined

(the modular), and they take on new meaningin both different times and spaces (thecontextual).

(Paul N. Edwards, Steven J. Jackson, Geoffrey C. Bowker & Cory P.

Knobel, Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tension, andDesign. Report of a Workshop on History & Theory ofInfrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures,University of Michigan, January 2007): pp. 7).


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Piranesi, Vaulted Chamber, 1745

mattern scms2012 infrastructure

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