Just before the UK went into it lockdown in late March 2020, I did an interview with Alexander Gutzmer on ‘media houses’ for the German architecture magazine Baumeister. We discussed what is at stake in studies of media companies’ headquarters, offices and facilities, with reference to my research into the Toronto Star‘s various facilities around … Continue Reading
Archives
Data Materiality Episode 2: Shannon Mattern on 5G, Media Materiality, Archaeology and Pedagogy
Although it’s technically been online for a week, I just took a short pause before publicising the second episode of Data Materiality. Data Materiality is a podcast series I co-host with Joel McKim, and is related to our three-year research project running under the same name, co-sponsored by Birkbeck’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Media … Continue Reading
CFP AAG 2020: Building Platform Urbanism
Susan Moore and I have begun advertising a CFP for the 2020 AAG conference in Denver, USA. The paper session we are proposing focuses on the theme of ‘Building Platform Urbanism’: the ways in which digital platform companies, or agents anticipating their interests, are increasingly involved in designing and constructing particular built forms and new … Continue Reading
Re-locating media production: IJCS special issue now online
After a slightly confusing spate of digital publishing and then re-publishing, I can finally announce that ‘Re-locating media production’, a special issue in the International Journal of Cultural Studies that I have co-edited with Helen Morgan Parmett, is now available online. I list all the abstracts below, and include links to the OnlineFirst page at … Continue Reading
The media-urban nexus: histories, stakes, possibilities (text of keynote paper)
Below is the text of a keynote paper given on Sunday 29 May 2016 for the ‘Mediating cityscapes’ symposium, held as part of the Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was an informal paper, in which I mainly was asked to open out some issues for the symposium. So I deliberately … Continue Reading
Urban media tour: 18 May 2016
After a two-year hiatus, Joel McKim and I are pleased to again lead our (evidently) popular urban media tour of West End London, this year as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2016. As always, we’ll be not only visiting a range of buildings and neighbourhoods associated with major media industries, but also we’ll be discussing … Continue Reading
New senior posts in history of architecture/photography/digital culture at Birkbeck
A couple of interesting new posts have been announced today in Birkbeck’s History of Art department (which has some important interactions with my own department, for instance through the Vasari Research Centre). These are senior posts, one in the History and Theory of Architecture and the other is in the History and Theory of Photography/Digital … Continue Reading
New article really, really published: The architectures of media power
Earlier last year I made mention of an article slowly making its way to publication. I was promised, in language seeming to implicitly recognize the general malaise of the approaching REF (thankfully behind us all in the UK … until 2020 which is already being talking about), that it would be out in the final … Continue Reading
New article published: The architectures of media power
Another paper of mine slowly grinding its way to publication – titled ‘The architectures of media power: editing, the newsroom and urban public space’ – is now available in proper typeset form (though still not with proper pagination) in the OnlineFirst section of the journal Space and Culture. I am told that it will appear … Continue Reading
The mediated city: a tour of media and mediation in West End London
My Birkbeck colleague Joel McKim and I are going to be leading an ‘urban media tour’ of West End London in just over a week, on Wednesday 22 May, 2013. This tour is, in part, based on a tour I originally developed for my undergraduate module The Mediated City, though it’s now being re-purposed (with … Continue Reading