Event
First, Remove Screws: A Cultural History of the Repair Manual
How to mend a damaged planet, a fractured democracy, a ruptured institution, a shattered iPhone? Perhaps we could devise cross-scalar strategies of repair by examining the history, politics, and aesthetics of the repair manual as a didactic genre, a bibliographic species, and a creative form. In this talk we'll explore how the manual functions as a means of “infrastructural inversion,” calling attention to the systems that enable infrastructures to function; and, through the work of various artists and designers, we’ll consider how the genre might allow us to translate between the individualized refurbishment of objects and the collective maintenance of systems and societies. In closing, we’ll investigate how myriad institutions, including our own, have deployed manuals, toolkits, dialogue series, and other instructional media in an attempt to mitigate social and political unrest.
Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. She has written books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council; and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. She’ll be the 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. You can find her at wordsinspace.net