Matthew Hockenberry (PhD, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University) is a media historian and theorist whose work examines the media of global production. An Assistant Professor of Media Industries at Fordham University, his current book project develops a media history of logistics, exploring critical developments in the epistemology of assembly by tracing how media forms shaped the emergence of logistical production and distribution in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is particularly concerned with transitional moments of mediation in the histories of paperwork, telecommunication, and computation.
As a visiting scientist with the MIT Center for Civic Media and Tangible Media Group he developed Sourcemap, a collaborative platform for mapping supply chains and sharing “where things come from,” and he writes regularly on the state of global supply through the lens of its most emblematic objects.
Select Activities
- Research Fellow, Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (2017-2018).
- Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellow, Society for the History of Technology (2015).
- IHR Mellon Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, University of London (2013).
- Lemelson Center Fellow, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (2012).
- “Sound Signatures: Epistemologies and the Order of Sound,” NYU, Humboldt University, and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (2014).
Select Writing
- Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media, with Nicole Starosielski and Susan Zieger (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
- “Techniques of Assembly: Logistical Media and the (Supply) Chaîne Opératoire,” Amodern 9: Techniques and Technologies (Spring 2020).
- “Telephone, Color Chart, Napkin: Logistical Legacies of the Bauhaus,” Bauhaus Futures, edited by Laura Forlano, Molly Wright Steenson and Mike Ananny, 273-285. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.
- “On the Performance of Playback for Dead Media Devices,” with Jason LaRiviere, in Hands On Media History: A New Methodology in the Humanities and Social Sciences, edited by Nicholas Hall and John Ellis, 110-125. London: Routledge, 2019.
- “The Place of All Things: Shenzhen, Alibaba, and the Oriental Bazaar,” in Lo Squaderno: Explorations in Space & Society No. 51 (Spring 2019): 49-53.
- “Material Epistemologies of the (Mobile) Telephone,” Anthropological Quarterly 91(2) (Spring 2018): 485-524; special issue on “Unseen Connections: The Materiality of Cell Phones.”
- “The Social Network of Stuff: On Media, Logistics and Supply Chains,” Conversation with Matthew Hockenberry and Kenneth Tay, Public Seminar (2018).
- “Inkonvensional Pathways: Soldered Supply Chains From Indonesia’s Tin Islands,” in Objects In Motion: Globalizing Technology (Artefacts: Studies in the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 2016).
- “Elements of Food Infrastructure,” LIMN No. 4: Food Infrastructures (2014).
- “Demands of Supply: The Illicit Pathways of Global Supply Chains,” Journal of International Affairs 66(1) (Fall/Winter 2012).
- “Small Business Applications of Sourcemap: A Web Tool for Sustainable Design and Supply Chain Transparency,” with Leo Bonanni, David Zwarg, Chris Csikszentmihàlyi and Hiroshi Ishii, in Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2010).
Select Talks
- “The Image Unassembled: Digitization, Aesthetics, and the Logistics of Anticipation,” in “The Processual Turn: Images, Logistics, Operations,” Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts, UC Irvine (November 7-9, 2019).
- “Telephone,” in “Glossing Over Things: Objects and Methods,” Society for the History of Technology, Milan (October 24-27, 2019).
- “Components, Crashes, and the Assembly Codes of Computation,” Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (May 9 2019).
- “Supply & Command: Encoding Logistics, Labor, and the Mediation of Making,” New York University (April 19th-20th, 2018).
- “Dial M for Maintenance,” Maintainers II: Labor, Technology, Social Orders, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken NJ (April 6-9, 2017).
- “The Performance of Preservation for Dead Media Maintenance,” in “Media Maintenance,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Toronto (March 14-18, 2017)
- “Art by Telephone,” Broken Telephone: The Creative Potential of Signal Decay, Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada, Montreal (October 27-30, 2016).
- “On the Methods of Long Distance Assembly: Painting by Telephone in the Margins of Design,” The Arts of Logistics, Queen Mary University of London (June 3-4, 2016).
- “Server Farm to Data Table,” Theorizing the Web, New York (April 15-16, 2016).
- “Ports of the Long Land and Sea Carriage: The Factory System in Early Modern Trade,” Media, Materiality, Infrastructure Workshop, New York University (2014).
- “Supply Chain Epistemologies: Changing Narratives of Knowing in Electronic Supply Chains,” Unseen Connections in the Ecologies of Cell Phones, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (2013).
- “Sourcemap: Where We’ve Come From,” Future of News and Civic Media Conference, MIT Center for Civic Media, Cambridge (2010)
- “Open Supply Chains,” MIT Communication Forum, Cambridge (2009).
Contact Information
Matthew Hockenberry
Department of Communication and Media Studies
Fordham University
45 Columbus Ave., 7th Floor
New York, NY 10023
Email: hock[at]nyu.edu
Twitter: @hockendougal