Urban Media Archaeology

Fall 2011Shannon Mattern

Rory Solomon

Mapping MediaDisciplinary Tendency

to Focus on Content, on Representation

Movielocationsguide.com

Via Alien Loves Predator: http://alienlovespredator.com/2011/05/04/new-york-movie-map/

Movie Map iPhone App:http://www.shinyshiny.tv/2010/07/moviemap_iphone.html

How would you map the institution of film

– the networks through which it gets produced, distributed, consumed,

etc.?

What other media “institutions” might we better understand if we

were to consider their spatial or geographic

qualities?

eBoy, FooBar

AT&T Coverage: http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer

The locations, heights and age of the mobile phone antenna installations filed with the Department of

Buildings since 2005.http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/07/signal-space/

http://auth.nycwireless.net/hotspots_map.php

Cell Phone Coverage Android App: http://bit.ly/nN9eLf

http://senseable.mit.edu/currentcity/index.html | http://vimeo.com/1839628

OPTE, Map of the Internet: http://www.opte.org/maps/

Kevin Kelly’s Internet Mapping Project: http://www.kk.org/internet-mapping/

What are the politics of these maps?

What analytical tools and methods do we employ in Media Studies that might

help us to understand these maps as media

themselves?

http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects

http://www.vimeo.com/4758009 [through 10:06]

See Lisa Parks @ Where 2.0

Consider the vertical dimension of urban media networks – the z axisMichael Chen & Justin Snider, Signal Space: http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/07/signal-space/

“A city...is not a flattenable graph. In a city, networks overlap upon other networks” (Friedrich Kittler, “The City is a Medium,”

New Literary History 27:4 (1996): 719)

Brian McGrath/Skyscraper Museum, Manhattan Timeformations, 2000

“[N]ew infrastructures do not so much supercede old ones as ride on top of them, forming physical and organizational palimpsests – telephone lines follow railway lines, and over time these pathways have not been diffused, but rather etched more deeply into the urban landscape”

(Kazys Varnelis, “The Centripetal City: Telecommunications, the Internet, and the Shaping of the Modern Urban Environment” Cabinet 17 (Spring 2004/5): 27-8)

http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2010/07/20/from-fire-alarms-to-copy-machines-local-primary-materials-on-urban-media-history/

Derek Watkins: Visualizing US Expansion Through Post Offices: http://derekwatkins.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/posted/ http://vimeo.com/27376376

http://spacingtoronto.ca/2008/10/26/torontos-corridor-of-power/