Words in Space is the website of Shannon Mattern.
On March 28, 2026, I shared the closing keynote for the graduate student-led Critical Themes conference in the Master of Art in Media Studies program at The New School. The event — themed “New Constructions” — marked both the revival of this once-annual event after a decade-long hiatus and the 50th anniversary of the program, where I […]
On March 25, 2026, Curry Hackett and I shared “Making Sense: Seven Movements” at the Cooper Union. In this talk Curry Hackett and Shannon Mattern draw on their own research and practice to explore a variety of methods for making knowledge material — spatial, experiential, sense-able, manipulable, inhabitable, navigable. Through a call-and-response structure, they’ll examine how […]
On March 13, 2026, I shared the annual “Friends of the Library” lecture — "Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog” — at the CUNY Grad Center’s Mina Rees Library Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog [2] It’s been a cold, […]
On March 2, 2026, I shared "The Sustainability Stack: Cross-Scalar Design at the Library Field” with the Sustainable Design program at the University of Illinois
On February 19, 2026, I shared “Friends, Neighbors, and Artificial Agents: Campus Library Design in an Age of Tumult and Good Trouble” at Swarthmore College as they prepare for a renovation of their McCabe Library. Here’s a recording; I’m not sure how long this’ll be available! Art historian Aby Warburg ordered his idiosyncratic library in […]
Spring 2026 Website Search engine optimization and generative artificial intelligence have progressively destroyed web search. Meanwhile, expanding privatization, surveillance, and the militarization of our public spaces have impeded our capacity to explore and inhabit the physical world — and the instrumentalization and "optimization" of education have hindered organic, curiosity-driven…
On February 12, 2026, I shared my work — particularly, how I resituated 25 years of academic teaching and research to a more public, networked orientation — as part of the NYU Integrated Media Design program’s Extraordinary series. After roughly 25 years in the academy, I’ve recently resituated my work within a networked urban commons. […]
On January 28, 2026, I joined curators Noam Segal and Safa O’Keeffe to discuss “Synthetic Legacies” — “the traces that collaborations with organic, mineral, and synthetic systems leave behind, and how those traces might persist, erode, or be rewritten over time” — as part of artist Davide Balula’s residency at the institute. ’ll admit that […]
On December 10, 2025, I joined the doctoral students at TU Dresden’s Schaufler Lab, as part of their their Data<>Worlds series, to talk about the capaciousness of data across my decades of research
I have to give it credit: Philly didn’t beat around the bush. It made sure I was well aware, within a few weeks of my arrival, that I was not wanted there. That I was an invasive species. That it would punk me until I left. The stress caused lots of brand-new health problems, which I […]