Shannon Mattern (The New School) will discuss "Cabinet Logics: An Intellectual History of Book Furniture."
While the physical properties of our reading materials, 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 them. Even “the cloud” that seems to float above us today relies on heavy architecture for its operation. In this talk Mattern focuses on the furniture we design and build (or buy, or appropriate, or kludge together) to make, store, support, organize, and preserve our bibliographic objects. These structures scaffold our media technologies, inform the way human bodies relate to those media, and embody certain assumptions about what and how we know things through these objects. Part of the Book History Colloquium at Columbia. Co-sponsored by the Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library; Columbia Books on Architecture & the City (GSAAP); Columbia Experimental Methods Group; Columbia Dept. of English & Comparative Literature.
