"We have always had relationships with objects where we treat them like they are alive, from playing with dolls to saying 'my car doesn't want to start today,'" says D Fox Harrell, an associate professor of digital media studies and artificial intelligence research at MIT and author of the new book Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation and Expression.
Our relationships with objects, characters and avatars is always at a distance -- we are interacting with the representation of something, rather than the thing itself.
Polemical, always controversial and frequently baffling, "this exhibition speaks about the uniqueness of our relationship with objects and our fascination with them," says its website – which could mean anything.
The hours of labour and skill that goes into bladesmithing demands a different relationship with objects, presents an appealing worldview where not everything you own is trash.
Basically, the idea is that lots of physical objects that were once a part of our world, inextricably tied to our daily lives and memories, have been replaced by digital versions books, letters, photographs, records are no longer vital as physical artifacts, and "this exhibition examines the changing nature of our relationship with objects and even with time".
"Our relationship with objects goes back longer than any other cultural form and in a lot of the work I make, both collages and objects, I'm interested in the role artefacts play in informing the narratives we construct about ourselves.
As he described it, 'the child was only able to proceed to a full emotional relationship with objects after he had rendered them permanent and substantial' (ibid.: 258).
So, whenever we come to understand a sign as focusing our attention upon some conventional feature of its relationship with object, that is, enabling us to understand the sign as part of a rule governed system of knowledge and signs etc., we have an interpretant that qualifies a sign as a delome (or argument).
In addition, they are unchanging and entirely causally inert — that is, they cannot be involved in cause-and-effect relationships with other objects.[1] All of this might be somewhat perplexing; for with all of these statements about what abstract objects are not, it might be unclear what they are.
Because abstract objects are not extended in space and not made of physical matter, it follows that they cannot enter into cause-and-effect relationships with other objects.
All played pivotal if very different roles in turning sculpture away from traditional figuration and toward new relationships with found objects, materials, process, color and the viewer's space.
