v 2016. Bringing objects to life

Current program, abstracts for papers and art, and participant biographies for the conference "Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition" - taking place at CRASSH at the University of Cambridge on June 18-20, 2015.

Current program, abstracts for papers and arts, and participant biographies for the conference "Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition" - taking place at CRASSH at the University of Cambridge on June 18-20, 2015.

Architectural Design, 2007

2008

Booklet for the conference "Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition" at the University of Cambridge on June 18-20, 2015 - including the final program and the abstracts and biographies for all speakers, artists and filmmakers.

Electronic Workshops in Computing, 2021

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners from national and international cultural heritage (CH) organisations together with those from across HCI and related fields. We aim to establish how an alertness to tertiary embodiment (mind-body-artefact) can provide the ground for bringing artefacts to life, catalyse collective knowledge production, facilitate collaboration, and encourage the creative integration of computational and archival thinking. Key examples of engaging with this theory in practice can be seen in the projects of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Towards a National Collection research programme. In this workshop we will explore how embodiment can be and has been applied to digital objects and practice in CH collections. We will do this via three interwoven critical interventions: digital objects (digital collections, interfaces, tangible computing), situated interaction (how context shapes meaning) and virtual connections (collaboration and communication in digital rather than physical space (Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), crowd-sourcing and citizen research, knowledge-sharing).

Science Museum Group Journal, 2019

In this paper the author discusses three works of video art featured in the Technologies of Romance symposium held at the Science Museum, London, in 2018. The author searches within video art, as a genre or medium, within its technical apparatuses and within the three particular works, for contributions to the particular notion of ‘object love’ as drawn from a paper by Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess (2014). The author interprets the three video artists’ works with the aim of gleaning comparative examples that might illustrate or extend the ‘object love’ concept. Mathilde Roman’s book (2016) on the ‘staging’ of video art is an influence on the text, as are two short but profound statements by Walter Benjamin, one from his Theses on a Philosophy of History (1940), another from his essay on Surrealism (1929). History, ‘the past’, museology and ‘object love’ are all woven into the core of the article. As it moves towards its conclusion the author is inspired by the image of an empty, machine-made stocking (a classic symbol of Freudian fetishism) in Elizabeth Price’s video K, in such a way that the article ends by skewing both the idea of ‘object’, and that of ‘love’ in the direction of the fetish, while concluding that the past – just as much as any particular object from or of the past – tends to be subject to fetishisation. Meanwhile, video’s relative immateriality as an art medium, and its current use by artists, is seen as representative of an age of image-based archival practices that, assisted by digital technology, might now divert traditional, object-based processes of the museum – a shift that might be summed up in the phrase ‘screen becomes vitrine’. This shift, from vitrined objects to screened images might then, in turn, have implications for the ‘object love’ that initially interested Geoghegan and Hess and which began the author’s article and this dialogue with the Science Museum.

Proposals for papers and for visual and performing art are welcome for the interdisciplinary conference "Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition", taking place at CRASSH at the University of Cambridge on June 18-20, 2015. The conference will bring together diverse scholars, curators, writers, and artists in dialogue about material culture in transition - cultural, geographical, and temporal. The deadline for all proposals is March 15, 2015.

The Invisible Force Behind. Materiality in Media Art, 2014