Thursday, February 19
4:30 pm.
LibLab (McCabe Library, 1st floor, Room 104)

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus is on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media; and A City Is Not a Computer. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. Shannon serves on the Advisory Board of the Aydelotte Foundation. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Art historian Aby Warburg ordered his idiosyncratic library in accordance with the “law of the good neighbor” — arranging collection items to generate engagement between them, to cross-pollinate and contrast the ideas they contained. Similarly, the cultivation of relations is central to the spiritual communities — congregations, societies of friends — that founded many of our oldest institutions of higher learning, as well as the learning communities that have populated and activated them for centuries.

The campus library has historically been where disparate disciplinary knowledges and threads of conversation have converged. In this talk, we’ll consider how, in our age of tumult and technological transformation, the library can serve as a space of exception, resistance, conviviality, and hope. We’ll survey recent campus library design projects and explore possible futures for McCabe.

Sponsored by the Swarthmore College Libraries and the Aydelotte Foundation. 

Light refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public, the talk will be recorded and made available for those who cannot attend.