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  </channel><item rdf:about="https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/977">
    <title>The Otolith Group’s In the Year of the Quiet Sun | Magazine | MoMA</title>
    <dc:date>2024-04-28T16:53:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/977</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In 1964 and 1965, numerous countries—including many newly independent African states—commemorated the occurrence by issuing stamps that celebrated the first scientific study of the sun’s surface. In the film, Sagar and Eshun explore the output of the Ghana Philatelic Agency, a New York–based company that designed stamps for Ghana from 1957 until the military overthrow of the nation’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, in 1966. For the artists, the final year of Nkrumah’s leadership marked a moment in which the astronomical and political calendars of the Earth intersected, and the global ambition of Pan-Africanism was not only a dream but a material reality.]]></description>
<dc:subject>stamps postal_service globalization africa</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-bulgarian-computers-global-reach-on-victor-petrovs-balkan-cyberia/">
    <title>The Bulgarian Computer’s Global Reach: On Victor Petrov’s “Balkan Cyberia”</title>
    <dc:date>2023-11-12T19:38:18+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-bulgarian-computers-global-reach-on-victor-petrovs-balkan-cyberia/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[But by the 1980s, Bulgaria was one of the world’s major producers of computers. By conservative estimates, one in every 10 industrial workers was employed by the computer industry. The country held a 45 percent market share of electronic exports inside the Eastern Bloc. Its executives rubbed shoulders with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in 1980s California and sold the PCs powering India’s IT revolution. Its children were taught coding in communist youth groups, attended computer clubs, and swapped comic books depicting cyborg Lenins and a socialist ChatGPT. The country’s factories built pneumatic robot combines that could automate manufacturing, and its manufacturers supplied microprocessors for the state-of-the-art satellite Interkosmos 22 pinging around Earth’s orbit....

Can noncapitalists build capitalism, asks Petrov? Benjamin Peters’s trailblazing study, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (2016), outlines why the Soviet Union failed to develop an internet while the United States succeeded, and the book offers a surprising explanation: “The [US] capitalists behaved like socialists while the [Soviet] socialists behaved like capitalists.” In other words, the United States’ internet precursor ARPANET was achieved through strong government support and subsidies, whereas the Soviet attempts were torpedoed by the “self-interest” of its bureaucrats and experts. The Bulgarian case is different because it did succeed—partly due to the fact that Petrov’s protagonists were able to outplay the capitalists at their own game. They copied the code and then rewrote it....

But we are still unsure about whether this means we need to rethink democracy itself. Petrov largely sidesteps the story of Bulgaria’s own police state. For this, we can read Martin K. Dimitrov’s excellent Dictatorship and Information: Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Communist Europe and China (2023), a major work in its own right, which explores how China and Bulgaria grew information-collection “ecosystems” that were extensive but surprisingly analog...

Jaroslav Švelch’s superb book Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (2023) also offers insight into the cultural footprint of late communist computing. 
]]></description>
<dc:subject>other_networks globalization global_computing_histories computing_history</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="https://urbanomnibus.net/2023/06/gods-garage/">
    <title>God's Garage - Urban Omnibus</title>
    <dc:date>2023-06-15T15:49:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://urbanomnibus.net/2023/06/gods-garage/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[A sign of scarcity, or abundance? Neighborhood resource, or extractive enterprise? Creative fount, or environmental nightmare? It’s hard to know what to make of the dollar store, that category of discount retail promising low, low prices and opening in greater and greater numbers across the US. Reports of predatory tactics and economic harm, and even fostering violence, are growing along with the national chains’ presence, and municipalities are moving to limit their reach and protect other retailers in vulnerable neighborhoods. In New York City, the picture is a little different. Family Dollar cracked the Center for an Urban Future’s list of the city’s most prevalent national chain retailers in 2015, and now has more locations than Pizza Hut, Mattress Firm, or Pret a Manger. But the majority of our 99 cent stores are mom-and-pops — and they outnumber all the Walgreens, Dunkin’, Starbucks and McDonald’s outlets citywide. Gloria Lau and Daphne Lundi counted them all. The urban planners, artists, and co-founders of Laudi CoLab have been tracing 99 cent stores’ imprint on New York City’s neighborhoods, alongside the ambivalent feelings they inspire. Below, they explore the dollar retail landscape inside and out, from signage to store layouts, and from culturally specific commodities to dubious discounts....

“You are a kind of utopia, / you know. God’s garage,” Joshua Bennett opens the poem “Owed to the 99 Cent Store” conjuring the many possibilities and contradictions of the dollar store. It’s a place of abundance and excess, the kind that leaves one full but perhaps not well nourished. He points to the enduring draw of these spaces and their “sweet ecology,” how their alluring price point makes small joys possible. The siren call of these stores is especially audible to those who don’t have the spending power to shop in other places, or don’t have a local supermarket or hardware store....



The dollar store’s ancestors date back to the variety and general stores of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The United States’ westward colonial expansion created new communities in areas with limited access to retail stores. The general store became a one-stop shop in rural towns: a post and telegram office, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and haberdashery all at once. As these small towns grew, general stores developed into department stores, drugstores, and other types of retail.

Dollar General, one of the largest and most profitable discount chains in the US, is considered the country’s first dollar store. The financial precarity of the Great Depression paved the way for their new retail model. Struggling retailers and manufacturers were looking for opportunities to offload merchandise at steep discounts. Beginning in 1939, J.L. Turner and Son, a wholesale and retail business in Scottsville, Kentucky, purchased these goods and then sold them to customers at low prices. Over time, the dollar store model evolved from selling discounted unsold inventory from other stores to working directly with manufacturers to create products that sold for a dollar or less.
]]></description>
<dc:subject>stores shops dollar_store urban_planning globalization commerce social_infrastructure</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/28/cloud_colonialism_era/">
    <title>The era of cloud colonialism has begun • The Register</title>
    <dc:date>2023-01-18T20:45:35+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/28/cloud_colonialism_era/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Week after week, the major cloud providers have pushed ahead. They've announced new capacity, availability zones, and regions across Central and South America and sub-Saharan Africa – all markets that have undergone an explosion of demand for cloud services over the past two years.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud overwhelmingly dominate the US and European markets – and if they have their way, they'll control an even larger stake in these emerging markets too.
Laying the groundwork for world domination

For a cloud region to be viable, there needs to be a critical mass of businesses and customers with ready access to the internet. Over the past several years, cloud providers like Microsoft and Google have gone to great lengths to create and cultivate that demand.

Microsoft's Airband initiative is a prime example. The program, which works with local ISPs and satellite internet providers, seeks to bring internet service to a quarter of a billion underserved people around the globe by 2025....

Just as countless governments and empires have over the past half millennium, the major cloud providers will paint these investments as an altruistic effort to bring vital infrastructure, services, and jobs to underserved regions. And if it stopped there, that might be alright. But in reality the cloud providers are motivated by their desire to get more customers for their products....

all of this comes at the cost of stifling local competition. In Europe, antitrust lawyers are still grappling with the outsized influence of foreign cloud providers. There, the big three control 72 percent of the market, according to a Synergy Research Group report published earlier this fall.

But the courts are slow, and these emerging regions are hungry to capitalize on the promise of the cloud. So of course they'll welcome the cloud providers with open arms – leaving it to future generations to recognize their "gifts" as pox-laden blankets that poisoned any hope for home grown competition.]]></description>
<dc:subject>digital_divide infrastructure global_south data_centers access globalization colonialism Amazon local_media</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781410605252-19/world-sesame-street-research-charlotte-cole-beth-richman-susan-mccann-brown">
    <title>The World of Sesame Street Research | 19 | G Is for Growing | Charlott</title>
    <dc:date>2022-12-20T02:22:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781410605252-19/world-sesame-street-research-charlotte-cole-beth-richman-susan-mccann-brown</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The globalization of Sesame Street began in the early 1970s, shortly after the series' initial broadcast in 1969 in the United States. Producers from Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and Germany approached CTW independently, seeing the value of Sesame Street, but wanting programs that would specifically address the educational needs of the children of their own countries. To create the se­ ries that the producers imagined, CTW devised a flexible production plan that has continued to evolve over time and is now used to develop all of our international productions of Sesame Street. Although this model was fairly simple-initially, producers enhanced dubbed versions of the program with instructional cutaways and local language voice-overs-eventually a full model emerged. As in the United States, a triune of individuals is involved: Producers are responsible for the creative elements of the production, educa­ tional content specialists set the curricular priorities, and researchers represent the voice of the child and provide information about the program's effective­ ness. Studio sets reflective of a given culture are created by local production teams and inhabited by characters developed specifically for each adaptation. Live-action videos and animations are produced in-country, giving the local viewers characters and venues that have direct relevance to their own lives. For example, the production in Mexico, which was one of the first produc­ tions to use the model in its fullest form, takes place in a colorful Plaza popu­ lated by Abelardo, a bright green parrot, a grouch character named Poncho Contreras, and others. At least one half of the material broadcast is created by the local producer, whereas 50% or less of the program's content is material dubbed from CTW's international library of segments. These segments are selected by each local production team for their pertinence to a given pro­ gram's educational goals and for their general contribution to the production.
]]></description>
<dc:subject>sesame_street television adaptation globalization music set_design</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17547075.2017.1322876">
    <title>Diplomacy and the Design School: The Ford Foundation and India’s National Institute of Design: Design and Culture: Vol 9, No 2</title>
    <dc:date>2022-02-27T15:01:24+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17547075.2017.1322876</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[This article explores the Cold War context for the relationship between India’s National Institute of Design and its US funder, the Ford Foundation. Drawing on Ford Foundation archives to examine the complexities of philanthropic funds for US diplomacy with India, this article acknowledges US hegemony in design and modernization discourse, while also balancing it with attention to the reciprocal flows of knowledge between the West and the global South. This article examines the impact of design networks and expertise on international political and economic negotiations, and argues that Indian nationalism, both at the government level and in the design school, influenced Ford Foundation activities.]]></description>
<dc:subject>development diplomacy anthrodesign design ethnography globalization colonialism</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:26f897b977d1/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8F7GZnERNU&amp;feature=youtu.be">
    <title>Maersk - 'Together, All The Way' – An Anthem (©A.P. Moller – Maersk) - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2020-11-11T20:11:37+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8F7GZnERNU&amp;feature=youtu.be</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Every day we connect the world seamlessly and transparently – making trust the thing that transforms our industry. We couldn’t do it if we weren’t in this together, and at Maersk, we’re together, all the way]]></description>
<dc:subject>logistics globalization supply_chain advertising</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:3e4eb623334e/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/technology/global-internet.html?auth=login-email&amp;login=email">
    <title>The Global Internet Is a Mirage - The New York Times</title>
    <dc:date>2020-08-16T14:40:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/technology/global-internet.html?auth=login-email&amp;login=email</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[the internet was never as global or interconnected as the ideal. What we mean when we talk about a unified global internet is a history in which the internet was dominated by America, with U.S. companies and U.S. values infusing the world. The exception was China, which operated a parallel internet world.

For years, foreign governments at times pushed back at the American-tinged internet. They sometimes had understandable reasons. Germany, for example, has strong norms of personal privacy and strict rules against denial of the Holocaust. That has resulted in conflict with the American internet companies’ standards of personal data collection and free expression.

Other times, governments have imposed restrictions on online activity to silence opposition from their own citizens. Whether or not we agree with such tactics, the internet has never been a single global blob where borders didn’t matter.]]></description>
<dc:subject>Internet regulation globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="http://gloknos.ac.uk/about-gloknos">
    <title>Centre for Global Knowledge Studies</title>
    <dc:date>2018-12-01T18:02:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://gloknos.ac.uk/about-gloknos</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos) was founded by Dr. Inanna Hamati-Ataya in autumn 2017 with support from the European Research Council, and inaugurated at CRASSH, University of Cambridge, in autumn 2018. Welcome to our website.

gloknos (/'glɒnɒs/) is a multi-disciplinary research centre and intellectual community concerned with the constitution, diffusion, exchange, and use of human knowledges throughout history. It aims to foster advanced cross-disciplinary research and pedagogical training in Global Epistemics, as well as cross-sectorial exchanges and initiatives, through a global network of associate members and partners engaged in academic and public-oriented collaborations and activities, an institutional and virtual infrastructure, and a range of scientific and public dissemination channels dedicated to the diffusion of its research outputs to the widest audience.
]]></description>
<dc:subject>epistemology deep_time globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b4de561ba20e/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:epistemology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:deep_time"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/remapping-sound-studies/">
    <title>Remapping Sound Studies - Franklin Humanities Institute</title>
    <dc:date>2018-11-20T06:38:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://humanitiesfutures.org/papers/remapping-sound-studies/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[the first wave of sound studies produced narratives on the history of sound in modernity told from largely Northern-centric perspectives. The neglect of the global South in sound studies, and of Africa and Asia in particular, is striking. Routledge’s four-volume Sound Studies anthology—comprising 72 chapters and more than 1,500 pages (Bull 2013)—does not contain a single chapter on Africa or Asia (which together form over half of the world’s landmass and currently comprise well over 100 sovereign nation-states). The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2011) contains 23 chapters on topics ranging from Pixar and birdsong to cochlear implants and iPod culture, but Africa and Asia are absent there as well. The earlier edited collection, Hearing Cultures (Erlmann 2004), is also North-centric, the lone exception being Charles Hirschkind’s chapter on Egypt. Georgina Born’s recent edited volume, Music, Sound and Space (2013), includes just one chapter set outside Euro-America (Andrew Eisenberg’s chapter on Kenya). And Routledge’s single-volume Sound Studies Reader (Sterne 2012a) fares just slightly better: of its 45 chapters, there is just one on southern Africa (by Louise Meintjes) and two on North Africa (one by Hirschkind and an early text by Franz Fanon).]]></description>
<dc:subject>sound_studies sound acoustics listening globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:4f6078fa4814/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:sound_studies"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:sound"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:acoustics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:listening"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we">
    <title>If we talk about hurting ‘our’ planet, who exactly is the ‘we’? | Aeon Essays</title>
    <dc:date>2018-02-07T06:07:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Confronting the Anthropocene, in Africa and elsewhere, requires fresh sources of imagination. And these sources must be found at the frontlines of planetary transformation – from the urban advocates for cleaner air and water, to intellectuals who challenge European and North American paradigms for studying the world. That’s why Africa plays a huge role not only in our planet’s present, but also in its future, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and other African scholars have argued. Africa is the continent where population growth is projected to be the highest. It contains 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Some pockets of Africa lie at the forefront of decentralised energy systems (such as solar power) that promise to mitigate climate change. And that’s only for starters.

If the Anthropocene is to have real value as a category of thought and a call to action, it must federate people and places, not just disciplines. It requires thinking from, and with, Africa. ‘They’ are ‘us’, and there is no planetary ‘we’ without them.]]></description>
<dc:subject>anthropocene planetary_urbanism globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:477567730185/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:anthropocene"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:planetary_urbanism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://we-make-money-not-art.com/shanzhai-archeology-defying-our-standardized-technological-imagination/">
    <title>Shanzhai Archeology: defying our standardized technological imagination – We Make Money Not Art</title>
    <dc:date>2017-06-09T22:43:38+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://we-make-money-not-art.com/shanzhai-archeology-defying-our-standardized-technological-imagination/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Over the past couple of years, Maria Roszkowska, Clément Renaud and Nicolas Maigret from DISNOVATION.ORG have been quietly smuggling odd-looking phones from China to Europe. They’ve got a phone that doubles up as a stun gun, one that’s shaped like a big strawberry, one you can use to light up your cigarette, one that will assist you in your religious rituals, etc. 

These bizarre devices belong to the shanzhai production. They are counterfeit consumer goods, sold at lower prices and boasting multifunctional performances....

For the Shanzhai Archeology research, we identified a series of phones manufactured in Shenzhen. Each of them combines several functions. They are hybrid objects that reflect very specific uses and are accompanied by stories and narratives. 

The Buddha Phone is presented like a “virtual prayer room” – it is equipped with a touch that loads a kind of private, virtual and customizable altar. It is supposed to help Buddhists perform their rituals when they are away from home. You can simulate the burning of incense, replicate purification rites or play music to help you meditate wherever you are...

And finally what made Shenzhen such a relevant city to investigate for the project?
It is the geographical area where most of the world electronics are produced and assembled.

We focused on the “phone” object as it plays a key role in the larger history of technological hybridization. More precisely, in the history of technological production that defies Western norms and standards. This project is an entry point to other technological imaginations, miles away from the black tactile rectangle (which has become the representation by default of the mobile phone).

]]></description>
<dc:subject>materiality material_media manufacturing China intellectual_property globalization innovation</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b439c3d5c112/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:material_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:manufacturing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:China"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:intellectual_property"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:innovation"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://reallifemag.com/close-calls/">
    <title>Close Calls — Real Life</title>
    <dc:date>2017-02-02T18:03:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://reallifemag.com/close-calls/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[With rose-tinted glasses on, part of me appreciates the memory of slow communication, the letters, the anticipation. Knowing what I do about surveillance possibilities, and the role of corporations in that surveillance, slower forms of communication seem even more attractive: they allow me to own the information that is sent to me, and to know who has access to the information I send. But for people I’ve spoken to, as long as the instant communication factor remains, nobody really cares who else can see those messages, or where that data lives. In the future, what will these new forms of digital literacies result in? More power to the corporations, zero ability to know who has access to my personal updates? Given the huge benefits that these new technologies afford, especially to immigrant and diaspora communities for whom communication is literally life-changing, it seems unlikely that we’d ever give them up for issues of control and agency that are far harder to perceive or understand than what we gain back.

For people who are apart from their loved ones, social media and messaging apps provide us with a place to be together in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. They provide an antidote to the physical separation of immigration, a way of making those sacrifices a little less so than they otherwise might be. At a time with more global migration than ever before, these technologies are becoming ever more important to maintaining family ties. For these communities, communication technologies and social media are not isolating, they’re uniting.]]></description>
<dc:subject>immigration visibility globalization migration geography social_media identity</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:d12c518dc014/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:immigration"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:visibility"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:migration"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:geography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:social_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:identity"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://nyuhumanities.org/rhunhattan/">
    <title>RHUNHATTAN: A TALE OF TWO ISLANDS | NYU Center for the Humanities</title>
    <dc:date>2016-10-24T11:39:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://nyuhumanities.org/rhunhattan/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[I strive to uncover invisible, suppressed stories that lie in the geopolitical shadows of colonialism and migration. As the 2016-17 Artist-in-Residence at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, I will research the social history of plants via spice routes and botanical expeditions to create a multiplatform project, Rhunhattan, that will include psychogeographic and immersive tech experiences, as well as object and olfactory work to bring forth the historical and contemporary relationship between the islands of Rhun (located in present-day Banda Island Archipelago of Indonesia) and Manaháhtaan (original Lenape name of Manhattan).

During 17th century Spice Wars, Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam was captured by the British and renamed “New York.” By 1667, the Dutch relinquished their claim to the colony in exchange for Rhun, the sole British colony in the Banda Islands of present-day Indonesia, thereby gaining monopoly of the lucrative nutmeg and mace trade. This pivotal moment came at a bloody cost for Indigenous peoples: both for the Bandanese and the Lenape people of Manaháhtaan. Over the centuries, as the spice trade faded, Rhun also settled into the background while Manaháhtaan rose to unprecedented financial success. The remaining colonial landmarks that continue to link these islands are the present day National Museum of American Indian at Bowling Green, which occupies the original site of Fort Amsterdam, and Fort Nassau of the Banda Islands; both forts share the same diamond-shaped architectural structure. In the visual narrative that I will be developing I see the identical forts act as portals between the two contested sites to collapse the time and distance of these two islands.

To tell this story of two islands with intertwined fates of land dispossession and erasure during the birthing of imperial globalization propelled forward by countless caravans and ships transporting spice, sugar, and silk, I am reeducating myself about the broken human relationship with land and waters. We are living in debt to our future generations and must learn how the Lenape sustainably managed the island for the sake of futurity over millennia. In a time when massive glaciers the size of lower Manhattan crashing into the ocean doesn’t make a media splash, we have a great responsibility to fight apathy. We are living in urgent times and there is a need to revitalize indigenous cultures and knowledge for environmental stewardship. We need a paradigm shift from falsely believing that human beings are landlords of Earth to seeing humans as being part of the ecosystem.]]></description>
<dc:subject>smell taste colonialism trade globalization botany</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:5d0945f062f4/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:taste"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:colonialism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:trade"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:botany"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-perfect-con/">
    <title>The Perfect Con | e-flux</title>
    <dc:date>2016-09-08T12:27:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-perfect-con/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The presence of artists on container ships, at first bedazzling, has become the new norm within the logistical routine of global commerce, of which the container ship itself is a living exhibit. Having been on a circular route for ten years, the cargo ship I sailed on, and any other ship like it, has surely amassed a vast permanent collection on the subject. This collection could constitute a floating museum, or rather an extraterritorial floating museum complex.

A museum of the ideal citizen, with a particularly strong selection of archives on the trajectory of the Ukrainian-Russian-Israeli engineer-mechanic who today occupies so many engine rooms on ships.

A museum of the flawed concept of time. The time of day doesn’t just shift back and forth as the ship sails. Rather, the very concepts of time and value change amidst different nationalities whose work contracts operate on different terms, at varying pay rates unadjusted for inflation since the nineteenth century.  

A museum of objects for hyper-productivity, of institutional design, with each cup carefully labeled, each drawer positioned exactly in accordance with rank.

A museum of a relational order-space, a space that is defined by the coexistence of the things it contains. A space in which nothing is allowed to be useless or out of place. An order that follows the militant power system on board, which actually extends into a twenty-four-hour lifestyle.

A museum of imperial cartography, of military geography, of private security industry booms, past and future.

A museum of indifference; of boredom and casual racism; of pornography, etymology, cultural relativism, and the “nominal” family of men, all formed through shared meals and video games, without women; of chameleon flags of convenience, creative bureaucracy, and the drum beat of Hyundai engine techno music drenched in sweat and blood and crushed bones....

As it stands, when an artist is invited to sail aboard an armed container ship and to turn the event into PR, she is indeed just an actress playing an artist in an advertisement, a reality exhausted by its commercial function. A container-ship residency extends the logic of containerization to art, artists, and their easily transported institutional critiques. Putting things in readily stackable boxes limits the ability of artists and dockworkers alike to interfere with the accumulation process.

And that’s the con in the “perfect con.” While such opportunities might provide a temporary fix for an artist, the means of their production prevent the creation of any actually existing work of art. Instead, “experience” is accepted by all parties as the interchangeable currency of the arrangement. Any artwork is a byproduct, an escapist entertainment infamous for the crew for exactly a week until it is discharged for a sequel. This byproduct—however provocative, radical, or ambitious—is secondary to the PR effort, and to the contractual fine print in which the artist not only tacitly agrees with questionable business practices, but also elevates them, usually for far less than what is promised by a “like-for-like” market exchange. And we’re told so to our faces, if not by our ever-forgiving and confused audiences, then by the sailors and the art-loving oligarchs themselves.]]></description>
<dc:subject>infrastructural_tourism artists_residencies globalization temporality logistics containers</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b5dda543f739/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:artists_residencies"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:temporality"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:logistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:containers"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://culanth.org/articles/823-seeing-from-digital-peripheries-technology-and">
    <title>Seeing (from) Digital Peripheries: Technology and Transparency in Kenya’s Silicon Savannah — Cultural Anthropology</title>
    <dc:date>2016-08-21T05:51:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://culanth.org/articles/823-seeing-from-digital-peripheries-technology-and</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“We don’t map those,” Kyale stated emphatically, gesturing to the spigot jutting out of a makeshift mud structure from which women were collecting water in plastic jerry cans. His GPS unit dangled from a cord wrapped around his wrist, and it swayed in step with his measured gait as we passed by the water point. A flicker of confusion must have swept across my face, and Kyale leaned over and whispered to me: “That water point is not by the government, but by the community. It’s illegal, so we don’t map it.” It was nearing the second hour of our data collection expedition in Kyale’s neighborhood, an informal settlement of Nairobi, Kenya, that I will call Muhimu. A few moments later, Kyale paused in front of a different water point—this one with a Nairobi City Water and Sewage Company (NCWSC) meter attached—and recorded its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates with his GPS device. Later, taking respite from the heat of the day, he would retreat indoors to upload these coordinates to a computer using the software platform Java OpenStreetMap Editor (JOSM). By aggregating his data with those collected by other volunteer mappers over the span of a few months, he would help create a digital map of Muhimu; it would be the first publicly circulating map of any kind to acknowledge the settlement’s existence. “It’s good to be recognized; people should know the real Muhimu,” Kyale told me, explaining his devotion to mapping.

That Muhimu could be known by outsiders at all was a novel idea. As one of Nairobi’s informal settlements, it was considered illegally occupied; as such, its villages, roads, hospitals, and schools were depicted on government paper maps and digitized Google ones alike as a vast swath of empty space, a large blank spot. The project that Kyale was volunteering for—Muhimu Mapping Project (MMP)—was one of many techno-utopian digital mapping projects that formed in the wake of Kenya’s 2007–2008 postelection violence, when politically motivated conflict led to more than 1,200 deaths and 660,000 displaced citizens. The managers of MMP—Sarah, a Canadian, and Miroslav, a Russian—believed that mapping Muhimu’s infrastructure would encourage local political leaders to bring resources to the neglected area. If Muhimu’s resources and needs were highlighted on digital maps, Sarah and Miroslav reasoned, the neighborhood could no longer be ignored. Bringing government attention to the settlement’s well-being had recently also become a means to ensure its survival. The citywide displacement of so-called informal areas had become increasingly commonplace as Kenya attempted to fulfill its ambitious long-term development plan, Vision 2030, which mandated infrastructural upgrading (Dolan 2012). This plan was eerily silent about Nairobi’s settlement residents, who comprised more than half of Nairobi’s 3.1 million people (Amnesty International 2012). During a presentation at the Africa Geospatial Forum, an annual conference celebrating the past achievements and future possibilities of geospatial technologies in areas of governance, development, and economic growth on the continent, then director general of Vision 2030, Mugo Kibati, had stated brusquely that “Vision 2030’s vision on informal settlements is to get rid of them. Plain and simple.” ...

“The whole point of this mapping thing,” Miroslav told me the first time we boarded a matatu van and journeyed from the freshly tarmacked roads of Nairobi’s Central Business District to the potholed, chaotic eastern portion of the city, is “to make the invisible visible.” Political recognition, according to Miroslav, followed from visually witnessing data about the neighborhood. For MMP, more information was imagined to lead to more substantial political engagement in the settlement. At the time of this interaction, I had been following the digital mapping activities of Kyale and his colleagues for almost a year. After countless days spent chatting with Muhimu residents and observing their technical training and data collection, I had developed what I thought was a solid grasp of the politics of service provision in the slum. I thus interpreted Kyale’s carefully calibrated mapping practice—choosing to map official water points, while deliberately leaving community ones undocumented—as a reflection of his unwillingness to disrupt the micropolitics of slum life and invite unwanted attention from the notoriously corrupt NCWSC.1 Despite these selective mapping practices, however, residents consistently justified their work by arguing, as Kyale had, that their digital maps displayed the real Muhimu. “Transparency is a good thing,” Sam, another mapper, told me unequivocally when I asked him about his desire to map his neighborhood. The mappers imagined that the maps could be mobilized as visual evidence to counter negative perceptions that circulated about the area. “Muhimu’s name has been tarnished,” explained Peter Odondo, a mapper in his twenties. “Most people are afraid and think it’s a very insecure place.” Using the words real and transparent interchangeably to explain their mapping work, Kyale and his colleagues expressed faith in the maps as unmediated visual truth, on the one hand, and knowingly produced highly selective representations, on the other....

This tension at the heart of transparency discourse—that revelation is always shadowed by concealment—has been well documented by social scientists (Strathern 2000; Hetherington 2011; Mazzarella 2006; Levine 2004; MacLean 2014; Morris 2004). Less frequently considered, however, is how transparency-seeking practices are informed by the subject positions of those who produce them. This issue, I suggest, was brought to the fore by the Muhimu mappers’ work. How does the mapmakers’ status as urban slum-dwellers color the production and reception of the information they produce?2 By bringing attention to a group of people—the urban poor—not typically imagined to be the producers of either technology or transparency, I uncover an irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the mapmakers’ sociotechnical engagements: while mappers like Kyale attempted to strategically produce and document transparent representations, they first had to prove they had the authority to do so. The mappers thus struggled to commensurate two desires: first, to be recognized as Kenyan citizens in the face of social and political exclusion, and second, to be recognized as technical experts, whose work was legitimated only when the maps superseded the presence of those who produced them. The mappers, I argue, aimed to be visible and invisible at the same time. How were these incommensurable desires shaped through mapmakers’ engagements with geospatial technologies? And what new aspirations and anxieties were produced in and through mapmakers’ attempts to establish belonging in Silicon Savannah, a term widely used in Kenya and beyond to position the country’s Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector as the digital technology epicenter of Africa writ large?...

To answer these questions, I draw on more than two years of ethnographic research on Nairobi’s emergent digital technology sector. Specifically, this article focuses on the desires and practices of a group of slum-dwellers who showed enthusiasm for geospatial technologies, which led them to join MMP. I explore how, through making their neighborhood visible through digital mapping work, the mappers also attempted to make themselves visible as technical experts. In this sense, making their physical location (Muhimu) known through mapping became a strategy to change their social location:3 as their neighborhood became legitimized, so did they themselves.

I thus suggest that while the goals of Muhimu’s technologically savvy residents were partly strategic—that is, they were careful not to expose features like community water points that might cause internal conflict in their neighborhood and, as I show below, they were frequently preoccupied with generating income—these strategies were bound up with a broader desire to fashion an aspirational identity. I thus consider the digital mapping activities of Nairobi’s urban poor not as purely technical operations aimed at illuminating previously invisible peoples and places, but rather, as sociotechnical practices that produced subjects and places in and through the process of depicting them. Digital maps, I suggest, are thus not merely tools whose utility can be analyzed separately from the subjects who create and use them (cf. de Bruijn, Nyamnjoh, and Brinkman 2009). Rather, they are objects whose meaning can only be apprehended when considered as part of a broader representational economy (cf. Kelty 2008; Coleman 2009; Keane 2006; Miller 2005). While producing and tinkering with digital maps cultivated aspirational identities, such practices at the same time generated unease, as the mappers feared that they would be unable to adequately capitalize on the technologies’ potential.4 Residents were intensely worried that competitors with better images or more professional credentials would outpace them....

The process through which mapmakers and maps fashioned one another influenced whether the information produced—the maps themselves—would be interpreted as useless noise, credible data, or something in between. Here, pace the dominant narrative in Nairobi’s techno-utopian social world, more information did not lead to more transparency (cf. MacLean 2014; Hetherington 2011). Indeed, what was at stake was the degree to which particular kinds of information became coded by various actors as transparent at all. Below I briefly discuss how digital technologies came to embody the shared dreams that animated Kenya’s ambitious development plans, while at the same time they also expressed and reproduced class-based hierarchies. ...

MMP was one of many geospatial projects that emerged in Nairobi’s informal settlements after 2008; these projects were variously organized and funded by transnational media NGOs like Internews, international development organizations like USAID and Plan International, educational institutions like Emory University, and geospatial activist groups from places as far afield as Italy and Brazil. Most mapping projects were implemented with local partners—community health workers and organizers active in the settlements.... Maps are “close to that Internet thing, [which] people are crazy about right now,” Njoroge told me, trying to explain why mapping had become so popular in Muhimu. ....

While the mappers celebrated the narrative of technology-fueled success, they also had to fight continuously against the growing anxiety of being excised from it and the persistent reality that they were not full participants in it. Shimba Technologies’ Mbugua Njihia—a member of Kenya’s elite technology sector—exemplified this attitude at a presentation at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference in Santa Clara, California. He implored the audience to think of Kenya as an emerging market that had different characteristics from the United States. “Think long distances,” he said. “Think poor infrastructure, but then again think opportunity” (Njihia 2011). Like the sharp business minds at Safaricom, Njihia invoked the idea that the poor could drive investment to Silicon Savannah, but that they themselves were not its authors. Rather, they were stepping-stones to others’ economic growth. Njihia’s comments invoke a double instance of fetishization: of technology as a magic-bullet solution to the problem of poverty and infrastructural lack, and also of the poor themselves as a ground on which technological experimentation could best occur; software coders and web designers constructed the poor as the constitutive outside of Kenya’s technological takeoff....

Aside from the technologists who worked directly on mapping projects in the impoverished sections of Nairobi, coders and web designers rarely (if ever) engaged in outreach with Nairobi’s urban poor.7 This lack of interest was reinforced by a material exclusion. Nairobi’s technology epicenter, the iHub, a multilevel coding/social/event space reminiscent of Google’s offices in the United States, was located in the western portion of the city in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Kilimani. Here, technologically curious Kenyans were welcome to attend free catered events, such as the Google mapping party, where participants competed for prizes by adding sites to Kenya’s current Google map. Outside of event times, Kenyans could use the iHub’s lightning-speed wireless connection for free. Kilimani, however, was on the other side of the city from the majority of Nairobi’s slums, including Muhimu, and the approximately $1 public transport fee was prohibitively expensive for most residents. Indeed, only one of MMP’s volunteers visited the iHub during my time in Nairobi. Despite the spirited interest in technology expressed by settlement residents, and the excellent technical skills exhibited by many of them, their access to the broader community of software coders and geospatial experts remained beyond their reach....

Both Ngilu and Njoroge imagined that the speed and immediacy of digital technology would forestall the malevolent activities considered an everyday part of social and political life in Kenya. Immanent to the digital form, in other words, were notions of ethics, truth, and prosperity, qualities that exceeded the technologies’ seemingly banal function on the streets of Muhimu, that is, as part of a diversified economic strategy....

 the digital in Nairobi was not merely a symbol of modernity; it was also a material form that shaped social life, subjectivity, and understandings of expertise. As a new way of seeing (Berger 1972), digital maps enabled Muhimu residents to produce self-representation, rather than relinquish it to a negligent or oppressive state, or to foreign development workers.11 This speaks to the new political capacities introduced by ICTs and the institutional mediators such as MMP that have emerged to provide a means for slum-dwellers to engage with them. By weaving a political argument about visibility, recognition, and belonging into the spaces between their strategically collected GPS coordinates, the mappers used technologies to challenge the Kenyan state and elite technology sector’s discursive separation of politics and technics.

However, the channels for sociopolitical engagement carved by these new technologies were not unobstructed. Just as submarine fiber-optic cables can be cut and rendered inoperative by vandals, bringing communications networks to a grinding halt, information in Silicon Savannah, too, can be intercepted, rerouted, or impeded. To understand how and why, we must consider transparency as a claim about expertise; it can be embraced or dismissed, trusted or not. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>mapping cartography citizen_cartography informal_infrastructure infrastructure africa slums globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:3d754dc35f3e/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:mapping"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:cartography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:citizen_cartography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:informal_infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:africa"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:slums"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.designboom.com/art/laird-kay-lego-city-architecture-photography-02-02-2016/">
    <title>laird kay's LEGO city critiques the artificial architecture of modern megacities</title>
    <dc:date>2016-02-08T11:20:08+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.designboom.com/art/laird-kay-lego-city-architecture-photography-02-02-2016/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[the seemingly-endless LEGO columns mimic the overwhelming concentration of buildings captured by michael wolf in hong kong last year, or the panorama of skyscrapers piercing dubai clouds, as documented by daniel cheong — illustrating an indifference to place and culture when constructing contemporary cityscapes. ‘cities used to be the result of collective will and a desire to shape – to control – our environments.]]></description>
<dc:subject>making cityscapes globalization presentation_images</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e2732b8af056/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:making"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:cityscapes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:presentation_images"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0-8qRzDNk">
    <title>Hot Metal Empire | ATypI 2015 | Tom Mullaney - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2016-01-24T20:26:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0-8qRzDNk</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, hot metal typesetting swept through newspaper plants and government printing offices across the United States and Europe – and soon through Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. With missionary-like zeal, the manufacturing giant Mergenthaler Linotype, along with its licensed UK collaborator Linotype and Machinery, carved up the world of script in accordance with the boundaries of empire and geopolitical spheres of influence. Soon, letterform artists and sales representatives in Brooklyn and London found themselves trafficking in Arabic, Armenian, Burmese, Devanagari, Hebrew, Korean, Mongolian, Siamese, and over one hundred other world scripts. In this presentation, I chart out the global history of this “Hot Metal Empire,” examining the relationship between non-Latin script development, media, and colonialism in the age of modern empire, industrialized production, New Imperialism, and the aftermath of the First World War.]]></description>
<dc:subject>typography globalization empire type_design language graphic_design</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:6b2c93dc9569/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:typography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:empire"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:type_design"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:language"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:graphic_design"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/the-box-that-built-the-modern-world">
    <title>The Box That Built the Modern World - Issue 3: In Transit - Nautilus</title>
    <dc:date>2015-10-17T12:10:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://nautil.us/issue/3/in-transit/the-box-that-built-the-modern-world</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[More than any other single innovation, the shipping container—there are millions out there, all just like the ones stacked on the Hong Kong Express but for a coat of paint and a serial number—epitomizes the enormity, sophistication, and importance of our modern transportation system. Invisible to most people, they’re fundamental to how practically everything in our consumer-driven lives works.

Think of the shipping container as the Internet of things. Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then re-assembled in your recipient’s inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes are designed to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant.

Once they enter the stream of global shipping, the boxes are shifted and routed by sophisticated computer systems that determine their arrangement on board and plot the most efficient route to get them from point to point. The exact placement of each box is a critical part of the equation: Ships make many stops, and a box scheduled to be unloaded late in the journey can’t be placed above one slated for offloading early. Imagine a block of 14,000 interlocked Lego bricks—now imagine trying to pull one out from the middle.

The container’s efficiency has proven to be an irresistible economic force. Last year the world’s container ports moved 560 million 20-foot containers—nearly 1.5 billion tons of cargo altogether. Though commodities like petroleum, steel ore, and coal still move in specially designed bulk cargo ships, more than 90 percent of the rest—everything from clothes to cars to computers—now travels inside shipping containers. “Reefer” containers, insulated and equipped with cooling units, carry refrigerated cargo and are plugged into power sources on ships or at dockside. Because the containers are all identical, any ship can move them....

To get a sense of how the system works, imagine one of the containers aboard the Hong Kong Express, which is owned by German shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd. Asked to trace a product through a typical container voyage, Hapag-Lloyd spokesman Rainer Horn suggests a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing, the kind you might buy at H&M.

Tagged, folded, and boxed, the T-shirt would be “stuffed” into a container with 33,999 identical shirts at the factory. Once sealed with a plastic tag and listed on a computerized manifest, the merchandise could pass through nearly three dozen steps before arriving at a discount clothing retailer’s distribution center near Munich. There’s the trucker who moves the box to a waiting ship in Xinjiang, the feeder ship that moves it to Singapore to be loaded onto a bigger Europe-bound freighter, the crane operator in Hamburg, customs officials, train engineers, and more.

Yet the container’s uniformity smooths each step of the way. Trucks and trains are fitted to haul the identical boxes; cranes are designed to lift the same thing over and over. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? “Less than one U.S. cent,” Horn says. “It doesn’t matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren’t important.”...

It took a pugnacious North Carolinian named Malcom McLean to launch the container revolution. An ambitious truck-company owner with little experience when it came to shipping, McLean—who had made a fortune in trucking in the boom years after WWII—was looking for a way to move goods up and down the East Coast’s traffic-choked highways faster and more cheaply.

His inspired idea: Put truck trailers on ships and bypass the roads altogether. Trucks could roll their trailers onto ships in North Carolina; the trailers would be unloaded in New York and hitched to trucks, then driven the rest of the way to their destinations. He soon refined the concept even further, doing away with the trailer wheels and axles, which couldn’t be stacked, and settling for just the trailer body. On April 26, 1956, McLean’s first container ship—a military-surplus WWII tanker—sailed from Newark to Houston loaded with containers custom-built for his company, Pan-Atlantic....

To fulfill their potential, dozens of players—from shipping companies to railroads and truck chassis manufacturers—had to agree on a standard. Years of debate, overseen by a little-known government agency called the United States Maritime Administration, resulted in a 1961 agreement that only ships built to carry boxes 10, 20, 30, and 40 feet long would be eligible for federal subsidies. A few years later, the International Standards Organization agreed on a common design for corner fittings, making it possible to standardize cranes, too. The resulting steel rectangle—20 feet long, 8 feet wide and about 8 feet tall—became known as a TEU, or 20-foot equivalent unit. The TEU quickly became the yardstick of global commerce....

Other effects are easier to pin down, like the loss of many dockworkers’ jobs and the death of waterfronts around the world as cargo moves to increasingly automated facilities on or beyond city limits. New York is a great case study: Levinson estimates that in 1951, nearly 13 percent of jobs in New York City depended on the city’s ports. Three decades later, nearly all of those jobs were gone. In some cases, urban waterfronts are now being reclaimed as prettified public spaces, half a century later.

Overall, the container profoundly changed the way we shop and work. Reliable, cheap transport made possible an explosion in global commerce. That, in turn, had more far-reaching consequences. When the cost of shipping American cotton to China, having it sewn into shirts there, and shipped back to Wal-Marts in the U.S. sank to nearly nothing, for example, the bottom fell out of the American textile industry....

Containers also changed the manufacturing process itself. The reliability of containerized shipping spawned a new field in business schools around the world, namely supply chain management. In the 1980s, “inventory” became a dirty word. Instead, everyone from carmakers to clothing retailers adopted a “just in time” philosophy, minimizing the time parts sat in the warehouse before being assembled and sold.]]></description>
<dc:subject>shipping transportation infrastructure containers globalization standards</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:c67e6218a955/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:shipping"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:transportation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:containers"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:standards"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201506&amp;id=52253">
    <title>Julian Rose on Wolfgang Tillmans’s Book for Architects - artforum.com / in print</title>
    <dc:date>2015-06-16T13:18:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201506&amp;id=52253</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[ALTHOUGH WOLFGANG TILLMANS’S Book for Architects, 2014, offers an encyclopedic survey of the contemporary built environment, those to whom its title is addressed are likely to recognize surprisingly little of their own handiwork. Architects have never lacked ego, and we live in an age in which their trade has taken on an outsize importance and unprecedented popularity as a premium product of the international culture industry—charged with all manner of place making and identity branding. But this has led to a myopic understanding of architecture as little more than a series of individual buildings as prestige projects, isolated urban interventions that remain largely discrete from the broader contexts they seek to transform...

The result is an equally radical rejoinder to both the glossy coffee-table volumes and the vapid Tumblr-style blogs that play such a major role in defining architecture’s cultural status today; it presents architecture not as it is conceived by its practitioners, or as it is pictured in the popular imagination, but as it actually exists in the world.

At first glance, things look grim. As the installation’s dual digital projectors silently cycle through the images at an unremitting pace, the initial impression is of an oppressive sameness. Take the numerous aerial views of cities—bleak, gray, gridded, relentless. A similar uniformity is visible in many interiors, particularly spaces of transit (airports, hotels) and consumption (shopping malls, storefronts)...

This repetitiveness is not rooted in the individual photographs themselves, which have the spontaneity typical of Tillmans’s work and are often stunning in the sheer visual complexity and variety with which they map architecture’s dense, tangled textures across myriad scales of construction, ranging from individual rooms to entire municipalities. Rather, the consistency seems to emerge inexorably from Tillmans’s subject matter itself, almost in spite of the endlessly varied perspectives he presents (a variation reinforced by the format of the slides, where images are often paired or even layered on top of each other). In this sense, his project is a distinct departure from the long tradition of typological architectural analysis carried out by artists and architects such Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dan Graham, Ed Ruscha, or Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who used a standard format to emphasize uniformity in their subjects. Moreover, their projects tended to focus on a literally superficial similarity, with each structure typically presented in a frontal facade view, while Tillmans emphasizes a more fundamental similarity in the experience of space, suggesting that the physical symptoms of globalization are the same, no matter where or how you look...

Even more subversive are the photographs whose subjects are almost, but not quite, identifiable as famous buildings. A swath of fussily patterned curtain wall, an aggressively faceted corner, the hint of a dramatic curve—these moments suggest that the highly individualized styles of today’s top architects may be more a matter of marketing than reality, ultimately reducible to a remarkably similar set of material palettes, structural systems, and formal strategies. Tellingly, too, these images collapse the distinction between individual and corporate authorship upon which so many assumptions about the cultural value of architecture are founded. Zaha Hadid? Kohn Pedersen Fox? Without a full picture, it’s hard to say.

In the process of breaking down icons into fragments, Tillmans undermines not just the buildings themselves but the conventions of architectural photography. The medium has long colluded in flattening the specificity and complexity of spatial constructions into easily consumed images, aiding in architecture’s reduction to branding and speeding its transformation into commodity. Tillmans makes this point bluntly in several images of the billboards often erected at construction sites, where garish, photo-realistic renderings trumpet idealized visions of the developments to come....

The results of Tillmans’s scrutiny are sometimes hilarious. Again and again, we see the endless contingencies through which buildings escape architects’ oversight, the numerous ways in which even the most carefully considered designs are no match for the messy business of daily use, of changing needs and passing time: A mass of hoses is jammed through a wall to enable the ad hoc installation of an air conditioner; a tangle of cables running across a ceiling disrupts the carefully articulated union of a beam and a column; gobs of expanded foam insulation ooze out of the gap around a retrofitted pipe and dribble down toward the floor. These are the kinds of things that drive most architects crazy.

But at other times, the results of the artist’s examination are simply heartbreaking. This is particularly true of the images of a multipart cardboard shelter constructed against the polished granite base of what appears to be an office high-rise: an example not just of the ways in which buildings and urban spaces inevitably seem to be adapted far beyond their designers’ intentions, but also a reminder that often architects are so focused on aesthetic control that they lose their ability to address the broader social and economic realities in which their designs are embedded.]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_architecture photography globalization authorship installation</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:f5062d0e46db/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:photography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:authorship"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:installation"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/">
    <title>The Digital Language Divide | The Guardian</title>
    <dc:date>2015-05-31T18:52:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://labs.theguardian.com/digital-language-divide/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Does the language you speak online matter? The unprecedented ability to communicate and access information are all promises woven into the big sell of the internet connection. But how different is your experience if your mother tongue, for example, is Zulu rather than English?


The relationship between language and the internet is a growing area of policy interest and academic study. The story emerging is one where language profoundly affects your experience of the internet. It guides who you speak to on social media and often how you behave in these communities. It determines how much – if any – information you can access on Wikipedia. Google searching “restaurants” in a certain language may bring you back 10 times the results of doing so in another. And if your language is endangered, it is possible it will never have a life online. Far from infinite, the internet, it seems, is only as big as your language....

Twitter users in different languages are also likely to express different behaviours. Some languages by their very structure mean that you interact with the platform differently. For example, you can say more in the 140 character limit in Chinese than you can in English. Research has shown that Koreans tend to use Twitter to reply to each other, while German speakers share more URLs and hashtags...

Scott Hale, data scientist at the Oxford Internet Institute, argues that more could also be done to unlock the power of multilinguals online. Internet platforms he believes could be modified to make it easier for multilingual users to find content in other languages, as well as encourage them to contribute in more than one language.]]></description>
<dc:subject>globalization google language multilingualism search</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:c9ec46ca50b9/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:google"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:language"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:multilingualism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:search"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://logisticalworlds.org/">
    <title>Home - Logistical Worlds</title>
    <dc:date>2015-05-01T03:38:06+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://logisticalworlds.org/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[How to study China-led globalisation through infrastructural interventions? This question prompts the investigation of logistical operations that fabricate the emerging trade network known as the New Silk Road. Moving between software studies and geocultural analysis of labour regimes, the project tracks algorithmic arrangements of power across the tricontinental sites of Piraeus, Valparaíso and Kolkata. These are spaces of docking and interface, material flow and restriction, in which logistics antagonizes labour. The extraction of time and social life from populations underscores economies of measure. Whether understood through the techniques of supply chain management or the architecture of real-time computation, logistics materializes the abstractions of capital. Subjectivity and labour expose the power and vulnerability of logistical worlds.]]></description>
<dc:subject>infrastructure software labor logistics globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:1d1abfa1df75/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:software"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:labor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:logistics"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/this-is-a-generic-brand-video">
    <title>McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: This is a Generic Brand Video.</title>
    <dc:date>2015-01-03T14:08:46+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/this-is-a-generic-brand-video</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[We think first
Of vague words that are synonyms for progress
And pair them with footage of a high-speed train.

Science
Is doing lots of stuff
That may or may not have anything to do with us.

See how this guy in a lab coat holds up a beaker?
That means we do research.
Here’s a picture of DNA.]]></description>
<dc:subject>marketing advertising cliches globalization funny</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:9d05f4405766/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:marketing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:advertising"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:cliches"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:funny"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/inside-a-massive-electronics-graveyard/383922/">
    <title>Inside a Massive Electronics Graveyard - The Atlantic</title>
    <dc:date>2014-12-29T17:54:44+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/inside-a-massive-electronics-graveyard/383922/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[This is the chaotic heart of one of the biggest economies in West Africa. A 15-minute drive from Parliament House, there are clamorous open-air production lines; factories churning out everything from paint to Pepsi; and the country's biggest markets. Agbogbloshie is one of the largest, a mile-long strip of wholesale stalls where traders from all over West Africa sell pineapples, onions, cattle, and car parts by the truckload. In the early days, anything they couldn't sell—rotten tomatoes, rusted-out car doors—got dumped on the marsh behind the market, attracting scavengers and savvy businessmen who could turn a profit from anything. Container-loads of trash from all over the country started coming straight here.

There were heaps of heavy machinery from local construction projects, hundreds of broken PCs, and a mountain of ozone-depleting fridges and freezers (so many that in 2012, the government banned all imports of used refrigerators—it hasn’t worked). This is how, in just 20 years, a lush mangrove swamp became one of the world's biggest electronic waste dumps....

Up to 80 percent of all the electronic devices and appliances thrown away around the world may end up in dumps like Agbogbloshie. Some research suggests that the average American, for example, produces about 66 pounds of electronic junk every year. This is hazardous waste—the cathode ray tube in just one old style computer monitor can contain almost seven pounds of lead—which makes it expensive to recycle. So hundreds of tons of this waste quietly disappears into a world of legitimate recycling companies, shady middlemen, and black market trash traders. Interpol says one of every three shipping containers inspected leaving Europe for the developing world is packed with illegal electronic waste....

Much of that ends up in urban mines like Agbogbloshie, and is processed by a workforce of young men with few tools, no safety equipment, and no training, then fed back into the global economy. When commodity prices were good, Chinese firms bought up pretty much everything, and scrap dealers made fortunes. It triggered a shortage that forced the government to ban exports of scrap iron and steel....

The electronic waste leaks lead, mercury, arsenic, zinc, and flame-retardants. They’ve been found in toxic concentrations in the air, water, and even on the fruits and vegetables at the wholesale market. Environmental campaigners say that many of the boys who have been smashing and burning for years are getting sick from the exposure and dying young.]]></description>
<dc:subject>e-waste globalization sustainability health labor</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:f55f242352cf/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:sustainability"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:health"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:labor"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.architectural-education.club/learning_from_cgis_rose_degen_melhuish">
    <title>Learning from CGIs - Gillian Rose, Monica Degen, Clare Melhuish</title>
    <dc:date>2014-12-26T06:46:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.architectural-education.club/learning_from_cgis_rose_degen_melhuish</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[we instead approach these CGIs from their circulation through networks; and as a consequence, we no longer want to call them ‘images’ but rather ‘interfaces’.

By starting with their network, this paper engages with the appearance of these visualisations by focusing less on what they show and more on how they are made to show it. For they are made to show it as they circulate around a network of offices and computer screens; they are worked on by architects, visualisers, project managers, the client, advertising executives and others; and the visualisation’s digital file thus constantly encounters various software programs, hardware devices and human bodies....

As well as the sheer numbers of CGIs generated, it should also be evident from the above account that the CGIs are highly mobile. And their mobility continues even after ‘final’ versions have been agreed (the 42 agreed in November 2012 were being revised a year later to reflect design changes). The ‘finished’ CGI as a digital file goes to all sorts of other places and in the process it gets converted into different media. So, it appears on the pages of promotional books and on the websites of the developer, to advertise their project (Msheireb Properties has a website, a YouTube channel and a Facebook page). The developer has also used the image in other promotional media: on billboards, as smaller posters and part of interactive models at real-estate fairs, and as framed prints in their offices. It may also travel to the websites of the architect and the visualiser and in order to advertise their skills. Already it is obvious why CGIs are popular with developers: they are seductive images; their content can be easily altered; and they can be displayed in many ways via various media....

What also became evident early on in our fieldwork was that this ‘ecology’ was not only complex but also somewhat unstable. Relations among various ‘allies, accomplices, and helpers’ were not always ‘steady’, and this also contributed to the mutability of the CGIs. Latour suggests that those allies, accomplices, and helpers become particularly noticeable in moments of crisis:
Take any object: At first, it looks contained within itself with well-delineated edges and limits; then something happens, a strike, an accident, a catastrophe, and suddenly you discover swarms of entities that seem to have been there all along but were not visible before and that appear in retrospect necessary for its sustenance....

Annotation: these efforts to co-ordinate and prioritise the actions required on the CGIs were not entirely adequate, and this was because of the translation required from a visual encounter with a CGI to a written description of that encounter. There was something about the annotation interface between certain actors and the CGIs that did not in fact travel very well. In particular, the ALA’s suggestions for ways to create more ‘poetic’ images – his requests, visible in fig 3, for ‘atmosphere’, ‘more magic’ and ‘MM’s (magic moments) – proved difficult for visualisers and architects to understand. One DA told us, ‘[the in-house visualiser] just kept looking at me going, “I don’t understand. What does he mean more magic?...

The paper has identified three of these interfaces as particularly important in understanding what sort of objects these CGIs are, as they circulate among diverse and dispersed allies. It has emphasised the intraface, where for example separate 3ds Max files (standardised by the EC’s guidelines) are integrated, thus allowing the EC to modify individual designs in relation to one another. It has stressed the multiple ways in which CGIs are used by different ‘allies’, and the way those allies design specific uses into how the CGIs look. And it has examined the necessity for traces of interactions with CGIs to travel as annotations through the network. At all of these interfaces, work is done. Work is done to create a digital visualisation of a view of Msheireb Downtown; and work is also done to make that work possible by managing the frictions created by the interfaces between software, hardware and various humans....

attempts to resist the ‘glow of unwork’ precisely by reconceptualising the smooth surface of surface of CGIs as a site of (net)work. 26 Rather than take these CGIs at, literally, their face value – that is, rather than focus on their materialisations as images – this paper advocates approaching them as digital files created by, and therefore materialising, a (net)work of interfaces.]]></description>
<dc:subject>interfaces renderings media_architecture urban_media urban_design labor translation globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:f98a0805ec1c/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_design"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:labor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:translation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.portikus.de/1476.html?&amp;L=1">
    <title>Portikus Exhibition No. 189; Simon Denny; New Management</title>
    <dc:date>2014-12-21T11:03:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.portikus.de/1476.html?&amp;L=1</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[For two months, the monumental gallery space is turned into an homage to technology, communication, and the relentless need for innovation. Simon Denny has produced an embracing and multi-faceted installation that functions as a documentary of the South Korean technology giant Samsung and its global success story. The exhibition’s title, “New Management”, refers to the legendary management philosophy that Lee Kun-hee, Chairman of the Samsung Group, infamously introduced in the early nineties. “The New Management” principle was first proclaimed in 1993 at a high-level executive meeting at the Kempinski Hotel Frankfurt Gravenbruch near Frankfurt am Main International Airport. Lee flew in his entire top management from around the world for a three-day conference, emphasizing the need to globalize and preparing his employees for a new philosophy of change he was going to introduce in order to turn Samsung into a global market leader in all its sectors...

In the introduction to the publication, Simon Denny writes: “In Portikus one sees a fantastic conglomeration of material that tries to monumentalize [Samsung’s] powerful cultural message; arranging imagined and remade objects around excerpts from Lee Kun-hee’s texts and Samsung’s history. I’ve tried to stay close to the context it describes: the global material language of corporate pride and presentation.” In commissioning two different English translations of New Management, a publication in Korean about the philosophy and history of Chairman Lee’s legacy, Denny investigates existing hierarchies. On the one hand, the material carries with it extremely specific cultural and economic meaning and value, and on the other, it forms a part of global culture and public information. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>installation institutional_critique corporatization samsung korea management globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e747351f439c/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:samsung"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:korea"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:management"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2014/05/andreas-siekmann-at-barbara-weiss-3/">
    <title>Andreas Siekmann at Barbara Weiss (Contemporary Art Daily)</title>
    <dc:date>2014-05-18T13:32:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2014/05/andreas-siekmann-at-barbara-weiss-3/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In 1842 the young Karl Marx observed the Rhineland Parliament’s debate on toughening the law on the theft of wood. While forests were publicly accessible, they did belong to somebody, and most members of the Rhineland Parliament viewed it as a criminal offence for the poor to gather dry twigs and branches there. Marx reflected on how the capitalist mode of production had always drawn its foremost boundaries between those who made laws and those who had to follow them. The first of these boundaries were to be understood very literally: territories were demarcated, other countries and even whole continents were subjugated and parcelled out. Natural resources and the people who lived in these countries became the object of private business interests and trade. In a very real sense, this history of conquest ends with the devouring of these goods. People face off against one another like animals in the wild. In the end nature encounters itself in the stomach of the predators.
The central installation of Andreas Siekmann’s show is entitled In the Stomach of the Predators… Large- scale panels, which the viewer can move, survey the current state of these ever-progressing developments and elucidate the disruptions that both state endeavours and private businesses cause through their dealings with the common good that is nature. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the seed bank established by governments and agribusinesses in permanent ice on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is just one of the nodal points in a global web whose pathways pump knowledge, genetic information and the fruits of centuries of experience from the Global South to the industrialised nations in an incessant blood-letting. Genetically modified seeds flow back in the other direction, binding local populations to the agriculture industry’s products. In complex diagrams composed of many pictograms that he developed himself, Siekmann approaches this subject matter inventively, with biting humour and unwavering faith in the power of representation....

In his long-term drawing series, installations and architectural models, the Berlin-based artist Andreas Siekmann engages frequently with the privatisation of public property and the restructuring of labour relations under the conditions of globalisation. Using formally broad-ranging working methods that converge into highly personal imagery, Siekmann focuses on the question of representation: how can we grasp these processes and find images for circumstances that all too often succumb to abstraction? Andreas Siekmann attained international renown through his participation in documenta XI (2002) and XII (2007), as well as the Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007).]]></description>
<dc:subject>labor globalization distribution isotopes archives agriculture</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:dae4adfd7d42/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:distribution"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:isotopes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:archives"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:agriculture"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/wangechi_mutu/">
    <title>Brooklyn Museum: Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey</title>
    <dc:date>2014-02-17T06:12:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/wangechi_mutu/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey is the first survey in the United States of this internationally renowned, Brooklyn-based artist. Spanning from the mid-1990s to the present, the exhibition unites more than fifty pieces, including Mutu’s signature large-scale collages as well as video works, never-before-seen sketchbook drawings, a site-specific wall drawing, and sculptural installations.

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Mutu scrutinizes globalization by combining found materials, magazine cutouts, sculpture, and painted imagery. Sampling such diverse sources as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry, pornography, and science fiction, her work explores gender, race, war, colonialism, global consumption, and the exoticization of the black female body. Mutu is best known for spectacular and provocative collages depicting female figures—part human, animal, plant, and machine—in fantastical landscapes that are simultaneously unnerving and alluring, defying easy categorization and identification. Bringing her interconnected ecosystems to life for this exhibition through sculptural installations and videos, Mutu encourages audiences to consider these mythical worlds as places for cultural, psychological, and socio-political exploration and transformation. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>art collage afrofuturism race beauty globalization cultural_imperialism post_humanism</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e7bcb27e2a5f/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:afrofuturism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:race"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:beauty"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:cultural_imperialism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:post_humanism"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2009/01/zuckerman">
    <title>Ethan Zuckerman on &quot;Mapping Globalization&quot; - Berkman Center</title>
    <dc:date>2013-05-13T22:34:24+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2009/01/zuckerman</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[notes via http://doalchemy.org/2009/01/notes-from-berkman-luncheon-w-ethan-zuckerman-on-mapping-globalization/: 

"on top of infrastructure: wave of globalization that outpaces the globalization we see today; wave of globalization: from historians: up to 1910: much faster than 21st century; global mobility

steamship routes, canals, railroads, telegraph cables; embedded in these maps: financial markets, multinational corporations, migration

Lagos, Nigeria: ~8,100,000 people; map: mainly clouded out; photos: taken by low-flying planes: expensive to do it multiple times; cloudless views: fairly expensive data; Nigeria: cheap, because not much demand for it

net mapping: hit point of complete incoherence; eg., Opte project, January 2005; can you spider the net and find links/connections?
network mapping: dies off around 2004; Cheswick and Burche: private, cost-per-project personal projects

oil/gas pipelines: maps from Petroleum Economist, whose yearly; subscription is in thousands of dollars

understanding globalization requires us to map FLOW as well as infrastructure

In Transit from Cabspotting, Stamen Design, using data from Yellow Cab
this one: built from real life data; reveal: different San Francisco than might intuit; normal street map: doesn’t pick out traces of avoiding traffic, or even: people going to the hospital (via cab); also see: blank spots: can mean a park; are really: neighborhoods: where you have low chance of hailing cab

street map: shows you what’s possible
flow maps: shows you what happens

When does mapping flow become surveillance? have to track people to map flow

global stuff: blinds us to places where we’re not connected
global stuff: blinds us to how local our economies actually are
“Friedman Fallacy” -- what else do we overestimate?

infrastructure has life-span, if built rationally at one moment in time: maybe not as useful at next moment in time; why the two don’t meet: we’re much less rational about how we think about things; skepticism about maps of infrastructure; increasingly: maps of infrastructure tell us a lot: tell us what flows were thought to be or should be; infrastructure: built in hopes that flow will develop]]></description>
<dc:subject>mapping infrastructure globalization telegraph fiber_optics flows</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:4f84f9961087/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:telegraph"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:flows"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://extrastatecraft.net/Projects/Zone">
    <title>ESC: Zone</title>
    <dc:date>2012-10-16T03:43:23+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://extrastatecraft.net/Projects/Zone</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The free zone, prior to the last few decades, was usually a fenced enclave for warehousing and manufacturing offering exemptions from customs or taxes. Yet this form that was largely relegated to the backstage has recently taken a position center stage to become a primary organ of global urbanism and world city paradigm.]]></description>
<dc:subject>zones infrastructure government globalization trade</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:6e05d90a56b3/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:government"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:trade"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120214/x-marks-the-spots">
    <title>X Marks the Spots [Studio-X] | Metropolis Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2012-02-16T22:45:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120214/x-marks-the-spots</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.  ]]></description>
<dc:subject>pedagogy design_education public_sphere discourse studio_x events event_space globalization networks</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:ed223746b427/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2012/02/an-atlas-of-iphone-landscapes/">
    <title>an atlas of iphone landscapes – mammoth // building nothing out of something</title>
    <dc:date>2012-02-08T02:15:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://m.ammoth.us/blog/2012/02/an-atlas-of-iphone-landscapes/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The talk is an extension of one of my favorite posts, a preliminary atlas of gizmo landscapes, which attempted reconsider the iPhone, not as a discrete, independent hand-held device (“the phone that magically has the internet in it”, which I think is more or less how Apple wants you to think of it), but as a networked object that both produces and is produced by a wide array of distant and not-so-distant landscapes, from zinc mines to Fed-Ex distribution hubs... Relatedly, the iPhone’s manufacturing chain — what I call the iPhone’s landscape of manufacture in the atlas talk — has been the subject of several recent news stories.

This American Life’s excellent “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” begins with an excerpt from Mike Daisey’s one-man show about his trip to Shenzhen — which began when Daisey saw a few photos of the inside of an iPhone factory, and was shocked by the absence of robots — and follows the excerpt with reporting that confirms what Daisey saw in Shenzhen... Second, the CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou, seems determined to correct the perception that his company dehumanizes its workers: “Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache" [yeow!]... Finally, the New York Times ran a lengthy piece on “Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class”, which explores Apple’s decision to relocate the bulk of its manufacturing operations from the United States to China over the past decade...     For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.”

This is a particularly interesting supplement to the component of my talk that touches on manufacturing because while I focused on Longhua Science and Technology Park — the FoxConn factory-city in Shenzhen — and the kind of place that it is for those who live and work in it, the Times article explains that the appearance of Longhua, which I described as “the iPhone city”, required the disappearance of  another city, back in the United States. (This makes it a similarly good supplement to the This American Life piece, for the same reason.) There’s a huge set of issues tied up in the relationship between Longhua and Elk Grove, as the article indicates, from the ethics of labor conditions to the rise of logistics landscapes as the key node in global trade chains to the disappearance of the manufacturing jobs that formed the foundation of the American middle class (and corresponding “job polarization”).]]></description>
<dc:subject>infrastructure manufacturing logistics iPhone political_economy globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:fe08af7519d3/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:manufacturing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:logistics"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:political_economy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://vectorsjournal.org/projects/surfacing/">
    <title>Surfacing: Cultural Geographies of Submarine Communications Networks</title>
    <dc:date>2010-03-08T14:32:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://vectorsjournal.org/projects/surfacing/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This interactive digital media project visualizes cultural geographies of submarine communications networks. These networks currently support almost all of our transoceanic internet traffic. Using video and photography of landing points and cable stations across the Pacific Rim, Surfacing maps the cultural processes that have come to shape the development of transnational internet infrastructure. "
]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_space infrastructure telecommunications globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:3bbca0bce15d/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://web.mit.edu/CRE/research/ncc/casestudies/seoul.html">
    <title>MIT CRE : Case Studies - Seoul Digital Media City</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T18:56:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://web.mit.edu/CRE/research/ncc/casestudies/seoul.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture media_workspace urban_planning real_estate globalization korea branded_places</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/index.html">
    <title>Edward Burtynsky [ Photographic Works ]</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T18:50:29+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/index.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture urban_planning geography photography film globalization environment</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:14a0b6e82765/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:photography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:film"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4483">
    <title>Robert Polidori's Metropolis by Robert Polidori - The Globalist &gt; &gt; Global Photography</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T18:34:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theglobalist.com/DBWeb/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4483</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture photography globalization korea urban_planning</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:259a84bbf204/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:korea"/>
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</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/field-notes/cable-tv-networks">
    <title>Cable TV Networks — S A R A I</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T13:00:38+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/field-notes/cable-tv-networks</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture urban_planning space place television india globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:18e10b2918f3/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_planning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:space"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:television"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:india"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/field-notes/popular-music-culture">
    <title>Popular Music Culture — S A R A I</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T13:00:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/field-notes/popular-music-culture</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture space place sound_space music music_scenes india globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:64aac02a5a66/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:place"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:sound_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:music"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:music_scenes"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:india"/>
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</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city">
    <title>Media City — S A R A I</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:58:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture space place globalization india urban_planning art</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:18cdf3329cdc/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:india"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_planning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:art"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.pukar.org.in/pukar/">
    <title>Welcome to P U K A R</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:32:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.pukar.org.in/pukar/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media space place research globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:a180955820a7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:place"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:research"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1238">
    <title>Graphics That Bridge a Linguistic Divide</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:30:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1238</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>public_space signs lettering globalization language textual_form</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:dd7b52e58674/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:signs"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:lettering"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:language"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:textual_form"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.humancapitalsoftwaresolutions.com/call.htm">
    <title>HumanCapitalSoftwareSolutions</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:16:50+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.humancapitalsoftwaresolutions.com/call.htm</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media geography telephone globalization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:a1d55e0211e4/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:geography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:telephone"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:globalization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
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