This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

In this talk Shannon Mattern and Curry Hackett draw on their own research and practice to explore a variety of methods for making knowledge material — spatial, experiential, sense-able, manipulable, inhabitable, navigable. Through a call-and-response structure, they’ll examine how actions from cooking and collaging to furniture making to syllabus design help us to make sense of a disordered world. 

The lecture will be followed by a conversation moderated by Ted Baab and Kayla Montes de Oca.

Shannon Mattern is the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held tenured full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of four books and the (co-)editor of four collections about urban technology, knowledge infrastructures, maps, and maintenance. She was the 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress and the 2025 Design Indexer in residence at the Cooper Hewitt. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.  

Curry J. Hackett is a transdisciplinary designer, visual artist, and educator exploring Black relationships to land, media, and memory. A Farmville, Virginia native, his work works across scales and mediums to speculate on the aesthetics and ecologies of the American South. Hackett’s work and ideas have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Metropolis, among others. Notably, his installation So That You All Won’t Forget: Speculations on a Black Home in Rural Virginia, is currently on view in the “Making Home”—Smithsonian Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

Hackett holds architecture degrees from Howard University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and has taught architecture at City College of New York, the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, and Howard University, among other visiting roles.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.