NYU’s Integrated Media Design “Extraordinary” Series

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. This talk explores two new projects: first, the Cross-Reference Coalition, an experimental school bridging New York City’s knowledge and cultural institutions, and framing public pedagogy as creative practice; and second, the Library Field, an ecological library that serves as an open-air laboratory for interdisciplinary design practice and creative research. I’ll examine how this work responds to the institutional transformations and the political, social, technological, ethical, and epistemological challenges of our age.

The theme of this lecture series — Extraordinary — resonated particularly strongly for me because, as I’m sure is the case for you, too, nothing feels ordinary right now. Just on the other side of a devastating global pandemic, we’re now living amidst political upheaval, environmental devastation, institutional collapse, and epistemological chaos. I might be able to plant my feel firmly on the ground, grab my placard and whistle, and put up the good fight more resolutely if my immediate environment felt just a bit more predictably, reassuringly ordinary. Instead, over the past five years I’ve experienced death and devastating fire, massive professional epiphanies and a huge career shift, battles with a notorious copyright scammer that threatened to wreak financial destruction, unprecedented health problems of my own as well as my mom’s decline into Alzheimer’s and, just over the past six weeks, my partner’s diagnosis with advanced cancer. EVERYTHING feels extraordinary right now. A term that commonly carries a positive connotation here, in this context, implies instability and unwelcome unsettledness. Even the foundation upon which we’d ordinarily root ourselves has worn away. There’s no scaffold to brace ourselves amidst the shocks.

Yet, as I’d like to explore with you this evening — even amidst this pervasive and panic-inducing upheaval, there is potential for abolition. And I’m using that term in the way that Ruth Wilson Gilmore uses it: to mean a clearing away that makes room for the creation of "life-affirming" infrastructures and institutions.

Speaking of generative institutions: after finishing my PhD here at NYU nearly 25 years ago — in this city that is a constant source of extraordinary talent and energy — [2] I had the good fortune of starting my career at The New School: itself a marvelously extraordinary institution fatally compromised by administrators’ and trustees’ insistence that it fit into ordinary institutional compartments — that it make sense on a spreadsheet, that it embrace our society’s compulsion toward growth and profit. [3] This was a community designed as an anti-institution, a place of “explosive ideas” and experimental thinking. [3] This is where, in 1919, you could study industrial history with Thorstein Veblen or social scientific methods with John Dewey — or, in the following decade, explore utopia and architectural history with Lewis Mumford, industrial design with Henry Dreyfuss, dance with Martha Graham, poetry with W.H. Auden — and later on, philosophy with Hannah Arendt and [4] experimental composition with John Cage. [5] Just the other day, as I looked through The New School’s digital collections for an image to use in a class lesson, I encountered another set of EXTRAORDINARILY prescient and contemporarily pertinent classes.

[5] This extraordinarily intellectually and creatively stimulating environment of course wasn’t perfect. As my friend and colleague Julia Foulkes — a vibrant and brilliant internal expert on the institution’s history — reminds us: [6] behind the progressive pedagogy was a perpetually exploitative labor model and deep institutional inequities.

[7] While there, I enjoyed — mostly — fifteen years in what was one of the nation’s first media studies departments — and definitely one of the first programs that embraced what we now call “multimodal scholarship.”

[8] That extraordinarily fecund environment proved extraordinarily generative. I did a lot of fantastic work: [9] wrote four books — on maps and libraries and urban intelligence and information infrastructures — and edited four collections on urban data and quotidian media practices. [10] I wrote about 100 articles and essays and book chapters — including lot of pieces about infrastructure, capaciously conceived; [11] and sound. What you’re seeing here is just a sample I can fit in a legible screenshot

[12] And because I soon felt a palpable and ethical mismatch between, on the one hand, the politics of knowledge I was espousing in my scholarship and teaching; and, on the other, the values embodied in traditional, paywalled, prestige-oriented publication venues, I decided to go “extra” — to prioritize wildly interdisciplinary research in a nurturing open-access, inter-institutional forum: Places Journal. [12] You can see here most of the 40+ long-form pieces I’ve written for them over the past decade — about geo-archives and border technologies and hardware stores and dashboards and experimental interfaces and fugitive libraries and sonic surveillance and infrastructural tourism.

[13] Here are my most recent pieces: about cardboard boxes and repair manuals and tree intelligence and water fountains and partnerships between public libraries and other civic institutions.

[14] Another of those recent pieces — for Pioneer Works’s Broadcast — is an interview with IDM faculty member Tega Brain and fellow super-cool person Sam Lavigne.

[15] Those years of prolific extra-disciplinary experimentation also manifested lots of projects: exhibitions, collaborative conferences, speaker series, and so forth

[16] Plus over 100 sections of 40 different classes — all designed to be extra-disciplinary — and all of which exceeded the boundaries of the classroom by being accessible through the open-access websites I built for nearly all of them.

[17] Yet those years of being and doing extra — particularly the extra institutional service that comes when you’re extra-disciplinary and beholden to the various fields your work touches upon, plus the extra you invest when you work at a place where there’s immense mission-driven buy-in, compounded by a huge reliance on contingent labor and the profound gender-based service inequities we see across the academy and in myriad other industries — all that extra labor exceeded even my capacities. These institutional demands, compounded with all the extraordinarily life stresses I mentioned earlier, prompted me to look for a change after nearly 20 mostly magical years at The New School.

[18] I was fortunate to be recruited by a few different institutions that prided themselves on their exceptionalism — their resources, their selectivity, their capacity to support the work I did. I chose an institution that was extraordinarily persistent and exuberant and explicit about providing extraordinary support for my work. [19] Yet here, too, that extraordinary honor — one of the most “prestigious” endowed chair positions at the university — came with such immense guilt-enforced extra-divisional service; and resulting 100-hour workweeks, that I ultimately landed in the hospital for the first time in my life!

What’s more, I quickly realized that that fetishized extraordinariness was a form of currency for an otherwise very conservative, self-satisfied, status-driven school. One obsessed — rather delusionally, I must say — with its own extraordinary nature. [20] As I wrote in a blog post last year: I remember attending a Spring 2025 campus event addressing how are the university defined amidst pervasive attacks on higher education. Penn’s university president — the quintessentially innocuous one installed after Liz Magill was scapegoated, then ousted, by the institution’s own board — initiated the panel discussion by acknowledging how important it is “that we lead with our values.” So, Penn, founded in 1740, “recently created a values statement.” Recently. Benefiting from multiple centuries’ hindsight, steeled by the threat of existential risk, the institution affirmed its commitment to excellence, respect, brilliance, being inventive, and “recruiting the most talented individuals.” /// “I’d argue that these aren’t “values”: they’re an AI-generated platitudinous self-help meme. These are the “values” you tack up in the staff break room at Salesforce — not the bold, ethical principles that anchor an institution whose contributions are vital to our social, environmental, and political welfare. An institution currently under attack from a fascistic, anti-intellectual, truth-warping regime. A regime “trained” and legitimated by our very own “elite” institutions. Our values should reflect reconciliation with that fact.”

[21] I continued: “Such milquetoast mores also lend themselves to authoritarian co-optation. The White House — recently commandeered by a few Penn grads — can claim to be hiring “the best,” “most talented,” “meritorious” individuals who display utmost “respect” for and loyalty to the Supreme Leader, who are committed to American “excellence” and engaged in “inventive” reinterpretations of the Constitution. When I look at Donald Trump, Don Jr., Elon Musk, Kevin Hassett, Dr. Oz, and their ilk, I don’t (entirely?) blame Penn — but I do see in these alums the dangers of an instrumentalist, entrepreneurial education. I see what happens when you build a university around a business school, and then run a nation like a business; when education cultivates cunning that’s deployed for the purposes of deception and extraction. When I watch these men proudly perform their ignorance and egotism and fraudulence on screen, I’m embarrassed, appalled, and furious.”

[22] That blog post marked my resignation not only from an “extraordinarily” extractive and demoralizing job, but also my departure from the academy. I realized I didn’t really want to belong at an institution among whose extraordinary distinctions are the creation of the most billionaires and the origination and propagation of the hedge fund.

It was a hard-learned lesson, learned far too late in life, 23 years into my career, but I ultimately realized that you don’t need an extraordinary institution — at least not one whose exceptionalism is defined by capitalist values and an economy of scarcity and prestige — to do extraordinary things. You get to define what aspects of the ordinary don’t sit well with you, and you choose your means of being “extra.” [23] Faced with, and felled by, an extraordinary that contradicted what I care about, I articulated my values in that blog post: “the small, the weird, the local, the public, the principled, and, whenever possible, the kind.”

“I’ve reaffirmed what politics of knowledge I value — particularly in this era of stupidity and cruelty — and how and where I want to live those values: by animating networks between public knowledge institutions in the city that shaped my intellectual and creative identity.”

THIS, to me, is extraordinary a world of domination and profit-maximization.

So, I’m back. And I’m starting new stuff — with an organization I’ve known well for ten years, and which feels ordinarily, familiarly radical and vital to me. And this new work is what I want to explore with you in my remaining time — and it’s likely what drew you here, since this latter part was the focus on my talk abstract

And from here I move to — and extemporize around — my slides…