Matthew Hockenberry is a media historian and technologist whose work examines critical developments in the epistemology of assembly to speak to the conditions of the world apparatus of production. His PhD research at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication developed a history of logistics, tracing the impact of media forms and material practices on decentralized production and the mediation of manufacture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is particularly concerned with the transitional moments of mediation found within 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.” He writes regularly on the state of global supply through the lens of its most emblematic objects.
Selected Activities
- “Art by Telephone,” Broken Telephone: The Creative Potential of Signal Decay, Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada
- “On the Methods of Long Distance Assembly: Painting by Telephone in the Margins of Design,” The Arts of Logistics, Queen Mary University of London
- “Server Farm to Data Table,” Theorizing the Web, New York
- “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).
- Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship. Society for the History of Technology. (2015)
- Funded Participant, Sound Signatures Summer School II: Epistemologies and the Order of Sound, NYU, Humboldt University, and The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. (2014)
- “Elements of Food Infrastructure.” LIMN No. 4, Food Infrastructures. (2014)
- “Ports of the Long Land and Sea Carriage: The Factory System in Early Modern Trade.” Invited Talk. Media, Materiality, Infrastructure Workshop, New York University. (2014)
- “Supply Chain Epistemologies: Changing Narratives of Knowing in Electronic Supply Chains.” Invited Talk. Unseen Connections in the Ecologies of Cell Phones, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. (2013)
- “Demands of Supply, The Illicit Pathways of Global Supply Chains.” Article. Journal of International Affairs. (2012)
- IHR Mellon Fellowship (2013); Lemelson Center Fellowship. Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. (2012)
- “Sourcemap: Where We’ve Come From.” Invited Talk. Future of News and Civic Media Conference, MIT Center for Civic Media. (2010)
- “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. Proceedings.The Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (2010)
- Sourcemap, Principal Investigator. Development Grant. MIT Center for Civic Media. (2010)
- “Open Supply Chains.” Invited Talk. MIT Communication Forum. (2009)
