The Technology, Culture and Power Speaker Series is a monthly gathering that explores critical insights on the intersections of technology and society. Our monthly gatherings feature leading experts and scholars examining the interactions of digital technologies, culture, and inequality. Join the TCP mailing list here. 

Please join us on January 22 for a lecture and Q&A with Shannon Mattern, Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. Previously, she held full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and art history at The New School and the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focus on media architectures, information infrastructures, and urban technologies. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media; and A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.

Pointing at Clouds: Indexing, Searching, and Citing in an Age of AI Smog 
This talk builds on Mattern's 2025 Design Index residency at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, where she explored various iterations of the index: as a bibliographic convention, an organizational method, a media format, a financial instrument, a corporeal appendage, an intellectual architecture, a literary genre, a creative form, a semiotic concept, and an embodiment of agency. This talk will consider how digital technologies — and AI in particular — have transformed the index, making it much more difficult to point toward trustworthy sources, give credit where it’s due, and establish accountability for infrastructural injustices. How might we build an index of resistant, remediating practices?