Metro Cross-Reference Coalition | Spring 2026
Wednesdays 3:30 or 4 to 6:00pm

Shannon Mattern | smattern@metro.org

Search engine optimization and generative artificial intelligence have progressively destroyed web search. Meanwhile, expanding privatization, surveillance, and the militarization of our public spaces have impeded our capacity to explore and inhabit the physical world — and the instrumentalization and “optimization” of education have hindered organic, curiosity-driven investigation. In this course, we’ll gather to survey the state of search and discovery, reclaim lost methods, explore strategies for circumventing automation and extraction, imagine new modes of orienteering, and conjure up new terrains of wonderment. Our journey will encompass the history of exploration and cartography, legacies of inquiry, tools of discovery, theories of curiosity, and counter-algorithmic means of “finding things out.” We’ll aim to engage with navigators and user-experience designers, tour guides and psychologists, artists and archaeologists. Each weekly session will exemplify a different mode of finding and exploring New York’s terrains and treasures, and our work will culminate in the collective creation, through the summer and early fall, of a scavenger hunt, map, or field guide promoting discovery of the city’s knowledge institutions and cultural heritage. 

We’ve got a fantastic group — 15 participants representing a range of organizations: Brooklyn College, the Brooklyn Public Library, Elementary Press, Franklin Furnace, the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City Public Schools, the New York Public Library (including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture), the New York Times (emeritus), the Pratt Institute, the Queens Public Library, the Urban Design Forum, and a range of arts and design organizations — as well as a variety of independent art, design, media production, and engineering practices. 

The Cross-Reference Coalition (website coming soon!) is an experimental school tracing exuberantly interdisciplinary links among New York City's libraries, archives, and other knowledge institutions. Hosted through the Metropolitan New York Library Council — a state-founded, member-supported non-profit serving the region's libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions — the CRC gathers knowledge workers and graduate students from our member institutions, along with local artists and designers, to discover what new knowledges and creative practices might emerge through integrative thinking, interdisciplinary collaborations, and inter-institutional partnerships. Each cohort will create a public project documenting its work and featuring the breadth of cultural resources available across New York City.