In teaching and research, how do we identify objects to work on that allow our interests to come together in the body of the thing in order to “organize beautifully undisciplined thinking”? In this seed, Shannon Mattern understands creativity as a process of self-discovery, where we might find research opportunities in attending to how we document our own quotidian fascinations. In Mattern's case, this might look like a process of finding words in space, treating lichens and mosses as co-authors of language manifested in the material landscape as one way of celebrating the often-unvalorized in academic research. What might it look like for you? How do you document the quotidian material archive of your life, and if you attended thoughtfully to it, what might you find there?
Bio
Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. 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, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. (You’ll note that the title screen lists the New School for Social Research as Professor Mattern’s affiliation: while that was the case when the interview was conducted, the above affiliation is correct as of the time of this post.)