For: A Wedge between private and public
Symposium in interactivity and public space
22 April 2010
SESSION 3 – Object

Report by Juliana Brunello

The Moderator Klaas Kuitenbrouwer started the third session of the conference by introducing some of the thoughts that Willem van Weelden had for his keynote speech, but could not attend due to illness. His conference would have been about the essentialism hidden in Bruno Latour’s actor network theory Kuitenbrouwer picked some phrases that Weelden told him over the phone: in the actor network theory of Latour there is an endless opening of black boxes, which turns out to be an endless process. Weelden refers to it as “a road to hell”. In our hyper-capitalist society there is also less and less margin in which ambiguous objects, like interactive art in public space, can exist as well as responded to. His speech will be published on the website later on.

The third session, having ‘lost’ their theorist, ended up having a more artistical approach. The first speaker was Yvonne Droge Wendel , a visual artist from the Object Research Lab. Her presentation was mostly “improvised”, what made it all more interesting.

Wendel introduced her project, which central questions are: What is an object? What is a thing? She points out, that this is quite impossible to answer, so instead, she tried to collect definitions for both terms during some of the meetings she organized on the theme. In order to do that she invited people from different disciplines, like material engineers and philosophers, and discussed these questions with them for a longer period of time. It was interesting for her to see how a kind of translation has taken place among the disciplines throughout the discussion.

(During her speech there was a grey ball rolling around the conference, seemingly aimless – one of the projects of the artist, controlled by remote control.)

The Swiss Army Knife and its morality: One comes with cork screw (for higher officers); another comes with bottle opener (for the lower ranks). Ronald van Tienhoven: Since soldiers drink beer, they only need the bottle opener, and only the Swiss Army Knives have a cork screw, because they are the ones who drank wine. Wendel: Each object has embedded in it a kind of morality. If one has/wants a certain skill, it gets embedded in the process of designing the object. Tienhoven: another example would be to have a second staircase for the servants. Modernism took a long time to become emancipated, as one can see in city planning, architecture and production of Swiss Army Knives.

Starting point of Wendel’s research, as Kuitenbrouwer points out, is that a thing is not defined, it is always something in contextualized and in relation to each other. The basis of it is the actor network theory. The interpassivity theory builds upon a fundamental difference of human subjects on the one hand, and technological subjects on the other hand. Humans and technologies together form networks as functioning entities (Latour). The object is never a thing by itself, it always ‘does’ something. An object is always relational. How these relations work is a question Wendel tries to answer in her project.

It is also about bringing the ideas of what objects are in general. E.g. why city planners would put a beautiful sculpture in a neighborhood and think it would do good, but that a bad sculpture would not do any harm? Is it possible for objects to be bad? Where do we start talking about things or objects? Molecules, something one can touch, an aspirin within the body? What about the temporal aspect?

“The mercedness of a Mercedes car can only come out on a good highway“. Wendel emphasizes that you cannot say you have a good bicycle if you don’t have a good road to ride it. There is always a relation among objects.

At the lab, Wendel and her team are trying to translate the discussions into materials. They are also trying to come up with new ideas for different objects this way. Every time someone makes things, it is made for a specific purpose. She thought therefore that it would be interesting to make objects with the purpose of thinking about things. They are not made for any other use.

They use the same color for all the objects they create, so that they don’t have too many qualities. By reducing them to their inner relational qualities, one can start thinking on how many qualities one object has to have in order for them to be able to discuss ‘things’. These objects have also specific aspects, like the Tracer, a curtain that depending on how it is positioned can be a square or a rectangle. Other example is a de-skiller object and a slime mold by Sher Doruff.

She finalizes by pointing out that each discipline has its objects that they use for discussion. There are human things and thingy things. A bicycle lock relates to another object, making it a thingy thing. The social sciences for instance look at human things.