January 20, 2016
7pm
Salon of former Palais Dürckheim, Cranachstraße 47, Weimar

Cabinet Logic: A History, Critique, and Consultation on Media Furniture Lecture Performance by Shannon Mattern

While the material qualities of our media technologies, and our material engagements with them, have evolved over the millennia – and particularly within the past decade – we still rely on physical supports, furnishings, to scaffold our interactions with media. Even “the cloud” that seems to float above us today relies on heavy architecture for its operation. These furnishings – bookshelves, desks, charging stations, server racks, and even beds, as more and more of us not only read but also watch movies and tackle emails from under the sheets – serve as material supports for the storage and delivery of media resources, while they also frame organizational systems and embody particular technical protocols. These structures render complex intellectual and political ideas material and empirical. In this study I aim to study how the design of organizational furnishings, both physical and conceptual, give form to epistemology, politics, and affect.