
The design and structure of cultural heritage institutions and systems comes with a values and a politics. The values and politics of these infrastructures are often worked out and explored in the work of artists in a range of media. This is just as true of physical structures and spaces as it is of digital infrastructures. I’m excited to continue our ongoing Insights Interview series today with Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York.
Shannon will be giving a talk titled Preservation Aesthetics at the upcoming Digital Preservation 2014 conference and I’m thrilled to talk with her a bit about the focus of that talk and some other areas of her work that are related and relevant to ongoing areas of discussion in the digital preservation community.
Trevor: You regularly teach a graduate seminar exploring history, values, politics and aesthetics of archives, libraries and databases. It’s an interesting mix of subjects, and the syllabus juxtaposes a range of very technical and practical work, like a piece defining FRBR (PDF), with things like Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge. What do you think this juxtaposition of subjects and modes of writing enables in the course? More broadly, what kind of argument do you see the course making about archives, libraries and databases?
Shannon: