Indexical Landscapes

Our streets stream data from embedded sensors, our metropoles splinter into districts defined by delivery logistics or crime data, while our contested zones yield their secrets to drone surveillance. Our cities and metropolitan regions are code-spaces, algorithmic landscapes, with layers of data and informational networks laid atop, and often spilling over, their traditional geographic boundaries. “Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City,” a concurrent exhibition in Art Center for Design’s gallery, will feature projects that explore these new forms and practices of digital urbanity. Yet even without their datified dressings, our landscapes have long been shaped using techniques and technologies that render them “intelligent” and intelligible – either to we humans who inhabit them, or to the various tools we use to cultivate, navigate, and operationalize them. So many of our landscapes – from factory farms and container ports, to libraries and factories, to airwaves and railways and codifed urban “zones” – materialize, and even render perceptible, the logics behind their own organization, management, and use. This panel discussion examines myriad such “indexical landscapes,” those spaces shaped to refer to their own organized content and operative logics.\
______________________

Curator:
Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. She teaches and writes about media infrastructures, media aesthetics, libraries, archives, and other media spaces. She’s a columnist for Places, a landscape and urbanism journal, for which she’s recently written a series of articles about data and cities; and she’s currently working on books about the longue durée of the mediated city, and the design of “intellectual furnishings” — the structures we create to house and store media. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.