Communicative Objects Seminar Series

Launch party and screening of the documentary film "Objectified."

Thursday, January 19, at 18:30 in C12

Objects & Urban Space

On Tuesday, January 31, at 18:30, in C12

Professor Stephen Sawyer (History/Urban Studies, AUP) and Professor Scott Salmon (Urban Studies, Eugene Lang College, Visiting Professor at AUP) on "Downscaling Competitive City Discourse: Planning in the Age of Global Megaevents."

Objects & Senses

On Tuesday, February 21, at 18:30 in C12.

Professor Christy Shields (Global Communications, AUP) will talk on "The Cultural Construction of Taste: A Franco-American Comparison" and Professor Dominic Pettman (Media & Culture, Eugene Lang – visiting at AUP) will talk on "The Found Sound Object: Technologies of Resuscitation and the Aural Punctum."

Objects & Collecting

On Wednesday March 21, at 19:00 in C31.

Professor Cary Hollinshead-Strick, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English, AUP, will talk on “Buying Time: Beyblades, Inception, and Tops as Communicative Objects.” If, as Walter Benjamin says, “children’s toys… are the silent signifying dialog between them and their nation,” what are we to make of the spinning tops that were suddenly central to both the French toy market and one of the year’s more successful films in 2010? This talk speculates about what these particular toys were being used to conjure a year or two ago. It suggests that their recent collectability has as much to do with controlling their surroundings as with the lasting appeal of launching a top. Professor Kate Eichhorn, Assistant Professor, Culture & Media, Eugene Lang College, will talk on “A Lock of Hair in the Archive: Abject Objects and Liminal Accumulations.” Much has been written about the history of collecting and collections, but what about those objects we are not supposed to collect? What makes a thing uncollectable? And what is the status of such objects in collections and archives? This paper examines the place of abject objects in and on the edges of collections, paying specific attention to what the exclusion of liminal objects reveals about collecting and about the archive as a regulatory space and practice.

This is the first seminar when AUP will be connecting live with Eugene Lang in New York through the new video conferencing system recently installed in C31.

Objects & Memory

On Wednesday, April 18, at 18:30 in C31.

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani (Visiting Assistant Professor, Urban Studies, Eugene Lang College) will speak on “Memory Objects: The Triangle Fire Open Archive & Museum.” How can we make concrete the multiple meanings, memories and political significances of an historical event – both for the past and for the present day? This paper explores how a community-based creative practice challenges conventional notions to create an archive that is multiple, dialogic and vital, and a museum that exists in a dispersed geography across the city. In 1911, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire took the lives of 146 mostly young immigrant women, in one of the worst, most visible, and most influential, workplace tragedies in American history. In 2011, on the fire’s centennial, the interdisciplinary practice on place and dialogue, Buscada (of which the author is a principal) and the grassroots Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition developed the Triangle Fire Open Archive to explore the fire and its personal, political and historical legacy. To tell the story, we asked for objects – documents, keepsakes, images, video, audio, and even sprinkler heads – from a wide variety of communities for whom the fire has lasting meaning and contemporary relevance. This paper will explore the author’s experiences of curating, encouraging participation in, and sustaining the Open Archive and Open Museum, to address how a project focused on one historical event uses objects both online and in the real world to foreground the ideas and multiple memories at its heart for today’s political context.

Julie Thomas (Associate Professor, Global Communications, AUP) will speak on “Objects and Memory.” Memory, according to Schachter & Scarry in "Memory, Brain and Belief", is flexible and fluid, a tool for re-definition of the self and of individual, social, cultural, historic narratives of the past, which then construct and re-align belief, and thus the present and future. Objects not only give constant credibility to this changing narrative of memory, but speak in different voices of many layers of memory-making and meaning. This talk attempts to offer for comment and discussion a tentative and very basic classification of three possible modes in which objects can create, trigger and transform memory, and suggests as illustration a contemporary object to demonstrate how these different 'regimes' of memory can be activated simultaneously through a single object, and thus can be exploited to construct multi-layered narratives.