Media, Technology & Culture podcast: new episodes on infrastructure and embodiment

I’m somewhat falling behind with the updates on the good ole blog here, but another couple of episodes have been published in my podcast series Media, Technology & Culture. Episode 6 explores infrastructure, focusing in particular on the internet as a vast, dispersed infrastructures on which various media technologies, including nonhuman objects, depend. Episode 7 explores … Continue Reading

City Maps: Shannon Mattern and Rebecca Ross on ‘Mapping urban media infrastructures’

In Workshop 4 of the CHASE City Maps series, Shannon Mattern (The New School) and Rebecca Ross (Central Saint Martins) examined methods for exploring, excavating, observing, testing, and notating urban media infrastructures, broadly defined. Participants developed a shared infrastructural question and cartographic strategy, before heading out to Bloomsbury’s Russell Square and environs to make observations. … Continue Reading

Data Materiality Episode 2: Shannon Mattern on 5G, Media Materiality, Archaeology and Pedagogy

Although it’s technically been online for a week, I just took a short pause before publicising the second episode of Data Materiality. Data Materiality is a podcast series I co-host with Joel McKim, and is related to our three-year research project running under the same name, co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media … Continue Reading

Infrastructure, platform, locality: A response to Motta and Georgiou (IAMCR slides)

Tomorrow I depart London for my first ever visit to South America; specifically, to Cartagena, Colombia, for the 2017 IAMCR conference. I have the honour of being the respondent to Wallis Motta and Myria Georgiou’s ‘Deep mapping communication infrastructure in super diverse London’ which has won the 2016 IAMCR Urban Communication Grant. The paper is … Continue Reading

Urban media tour: 18 May 2016

After a two-year hiatus, Joel McKim and I are pleased to again lead our (evidently) popular urban media tour of West End London, this year as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2016. As always, we’ll be not only visiting a range of buildings and neighbourhoods associated with major media industries, but also we’ll be discussing … Continue Reading

Mattern’s account of Media Places conference

When I first heard of the conference Media Places: Infrastructure | Space | Media I thought to myself, ‘how could I have missed hearing about that one!?’ The answer, I soon learned, was very simple: it was invite-only, as good events often necessarily are. Luckily, Shannon Mattern over at her blog Words in Space has … Continue Reading