Chairs, desks, shelves, cabinets, commodes, and credenzas: much of the furniture we design and build — or buy, or appropriate, or kludge together — serves to store, organize, and preserve our media. These media-furnishings are material supports for the delivery of and engagement with information. They frame organizational logics, access policies, and technical protocols. In this talk I’ll provide an overview of my ongoing “case logics” research project, while focusing in particular on the secret drawer, which emerged amidst an expanding culture of secrecy in the 18th century, but which has continued relevance today as an emblem of cybersecurity.
Shannon Mattern is a Professor at The New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence, and she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
Meredith Martin is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University. She specializes in anglophone poetry, historical prosody, historical poetics, poetry and public culture, and disciplinary and pedagogical history. She is the Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton.