In this online meeting, we will do a close reading of Shannon Mattern’s, ‘Extract and Preserve. Underground Repositories for a Posthuman Future?’ to discuss the deep spaces of deep time, preservation efforts, speculating and hoping.
The meeting will start with a short presentation giving context to the topic, the text and the author, and will be followed by collective reading and informal discussion.
No previous knowledge of the topic, or the publication is necessary. Instructions on how to access the text will be sent to participants in advance.
About the author of Extract and Preserve
Shannon Mattern is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The New School in New York. For 14.5 years she served as a faculty member in The New School’s School of Media Studies. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She’s the author of three books: The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Dirt and Data: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press. A City Is Not a Computer is under contract with Princeton University Press. Shannon Mattern has also written several dozen journal articles and book chapters, and she writes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures for Places, an open-access journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. She contributes to public design and interactive projects and exhibitions, too. And from 2006 to 2009 she directed the 600-student Graduate Program in Media Studies. She lives in New York City. (2020)
About Posthuman Reading Group
Posthuman Reading Group is a series of regular monthly gatherings addressing feminist debates about human relationships with non-humans, the environment and technology. The meetings are held online through Zoom and they are spaces for collective reading, thinking, learning and interdisciplinary exchange between participants. The reading groups are always open to all.
Access notes
The event will happen on Zoom – a link will be emailed to attendees. This event will be live captioned, transcription will be available afterwards and it will be recorded for archival purposes. For help with how to set up Zoom and accessibility enquiries, email info@nncontemporaryart.org.