Shannon Mattern | Reparative Redaction
In this wide-ranging new essay, media scholar Shannon Mattern describes numerous artistic approaches to redaction, treating it as a capacious practice with diverse applications across media, contexts and scales. Unlike ellision or erasure, redaction embeds a latent capacity for redemption: across words, images, sounds and structures, the act of disappearing or censoring always shows its own operation, thus opening new paths towards repair and healing. Mattern surveys multiple areas of practice, considering how artists, musicians, architects, archivists, librarians and technologists might all learn from one another about redaction as a field of possibility.