Taking from, leaving in, moving on

8 Responses for "Taking from, leaving in, moving on"

1. milena June 17th, 2009 at 9:50 pm 1

   just wondering what people think of kindles and electronic book reading devices.

   maybe i’m particularly attached to how text is typeset and have developed reading strategies for actual books that i can’t imagine working on electronic versions, not to mention the attachment that one can form to particular editions and copies of one’s favourite books.

   i guess i feel like technology might enable to carry with you the same information, but not necessarily the sense of place that being surrounded by your own library provides.

2. alf June 18th, 2009 at 3:54 pm 2

   Good question indeed re. the kindles, electronic books… that echoes my point on ipod, iphones, laptops, etc.

   In the call for the book, there are several themes:

   One is entitled “My home is my computer > compression of space: A home is not a house anymore. What defines “home”? Photo albums, books, CDs, DVDs,, TV set, Hi-Fi sysem, documents, letters and much more fill the shelves and cupboards of our houses. They were part of the construction what we defined as home. Nowadays we carry around a big part of our home in only one device”. Yet does this one device has the same symbolic value that all these other objects? What means more to us? The pack of pictures that we carry in our bag, or stuck in the middle of our favorite book, or the 1000s of pictures accessible on flickr or saved on our iphoto? An interesting question to explore.

   Another theme is very relevant to our discussion:
   “Belongings: The relation to belongings is reconsidered. To live one year just out of one’s suitcase / backpack is not a challenge anymore. You do not even miss the things which you left behind. Questioning the meaning of assets often results in the disassociation from things and furthermore from a settled life”.

   I can relate to this last paragraph as we are moving from NY to London in a few weeks and for the last 5 weeks, we’ve been camping in our apartment: one bag of clothes each, a few books, toys for the kids, a futon, and a table and chairs that friends lend us. All our stuff is in a container on a boat… and me who is attached to my stuff, I realized I don’t miss it. There’s enough a sort of pleasure to this emptiness… You feel lighter… Yet this ignores another role of the stuff - the symbolic, the emotional one… Yes, I can leave without all my books but I love them, and I’ll be happy to see them again, because the books as objects, with their stories, their marked pages, annotations have a meaning.

   back again to our discussion on materiality…

   al

3. Bojan June 21st, 2009 at 1:07 am 3

   It seems the discussion on materiality of objects and information continues to stir things up. Reading the post and the comments, I was reminded of the multidimensionality of objects. I like to see objects as memory containers. You access the memory by looking at the objects, by touching them, using them, creating them… – in short, by sensing their dimensions. And the sensing process is not always the same. It is situated and temporal. As such, there is no perfect memory retrieval. Modern information technologies give us an unprecedented opportunity to ‘take’ our objects with us, always, and everywhere. However, at least to me, not all dimensions carried in the object can be digitized and stored (and maybe they shouldn’t). Also, the aging of the objects stored digitally doesn’t happen the same way as with their physical counterparts.

   Let me use an example from my childhood to explain this in greater detail (hopefully I’m not going to be very boring with this). More than twenty years ago I had a pair of Adidas Ivan Lendl tennis shoes (white leather with blue stripes). I liked these shoes very much. They were very comfortable and aesthetically pleasing to my eyes (back then I told my friends I loved the shoes because they were ‘simple’ and ‘walked’ as I wanted them to). I was able to recognize my Lendl shoes by merely touching them. One day, sadly, I discovered that the leather of the inside of the shoes started to tear apart (exactly at the heel of the shoe), so shortly after my feet started to hurt. I tried to ignore the pain for a while, but at the end I had to ‘retire’ my shoes. Last year I visited my family and helped my dad clean up the garage. And I found my shoes. They looked good from the outside, but as soon as I touched them, I felt the rip of the leather inside the shoes and remembered the pain it used to give me in the past. I didn’t have the heart to throw them twenty years ago, and I kept them in the garage last year as well. The shoes aged, as my memories had. But for that one moment last summer, I used all my senses to access a memory that is multidimensional and difficult to ‘store’ digitally. I could have tried to use ‘technology’ to capture my experience with the tennis shoes. For example, I could have written an essay twenty years ago, or I could have taken a photograph, among other things. And yet, it would not have been the same. I’ve had many shoes after my Lendl’s, and I still buy athletic shoes on a monthly basis (I quickly wear them off), but I don’t keep them as evocative objects. So I forget about them. I can’t store them since I have limited space and a temporary apartment. Interestingly, several years ago I started taking pictures of some of my shoes in order to show them to my brother (in case he wanted them). I haven’t done that in the last three years and I haven’t seen the pictures again.

   In some way, objects, as my old Adidas shoes, compress our memories while preserving some of their tacit dimensions. We use material objects as memory shortcuts in creating meaning of our environment. Printed books have similar capacity. They can stimulate more of our senses by having a distinct texture, sent, or stains from their daily (ab)use in proximity of coffee drinkers. How do we capture this in digital form? Or should we? Is my blog going to age the same as my shoes, my records, or my first grade alphabet book? Is my digital photo library going to have the fingerprints of my friends on the photos? I’m not quite sure. My blog is going to have the comments of the ones who read it. Perfectly stored and ready to be accessed at any time. My digital photos are also going to be there, forever, perfectly ordered, with my personal comments and comments from my friends. They will have information regarding the time the photo was taken, the type of camera, exposure, etc. And all this memory can be accessed with perfect retrieval. In some perverse way, the materiality of objects gives them ability to age with respect to their form. With digital objects, in my opinion, it is the content that ages the most.

   I can live without many of my physical objects (as Anne-Laure does these days), but most of the time I choose not to. Information technology helps me deal with it, but it doesn’t substitute everything. Nor I want it to. I full-heartedly embrace the digitization of our spaces, and at the same time I long for and romanticize the fragility of our physical objects. I have many of my books in digital form (related to Milena’s question), but when at home, I read the printed ones. Still, while on the go, or when I need a quick search, having books in digital format is indispensible.

   Well, it is about time to end this extended comment. I just want to add that we often forget ourselves as being objects, among other things. We look at our reflection in the bathroom mirror every morning. We shower, wear clothes, age, and use our presence as objects (increasingly in digital form as well) to make sense of ourselves and of our relationships with other objects. Being objectified, we are living memory containers. And when we need to refresh our memory or even permanently delete parts of it, we get a new haircut, new shoes, new email address (not a new facebook account though, at least not that often). Same as when we throw out our old winter jackets and audio cassettes.

   Sorry for the lengthy comment, but it is a rainy Saturday in Brooklyn

4. alf June 21st, 2009 at 11:15 pm 4

   Thanks for your comment Bojan… I agree on the tension you highlight between digitalizing content and the materiality of this content. I guess there is a new dimension which is the materiality of the mobile medium - cell phone, laptop, ipod… Even these are objects with dimensions and they can become evocative objects and people do have emotional relationship to them (as Turklke’s studies highlighted)…
   I recently gave the first IMac we bought to the art teacher in my kids’ school. We had kept it although not using it anymore. My partner could not decide to get it rid of it - first because he loved the design, but also because it was full of memory. He bought it a few days after our son was born, he did all his multimedia work in Singapore with it, etc. I think he could write a similar post than yours on your Lendl’s shoes.
   Recently asking to someone the question: if you were to move, what would you take with you? My Iphone and she started telling me all what it meant to her.
   I guess the question for you is if you had to pack things that matter to you, just one box, will you put your shoes in it? When you moved to the US, you did not take them. You left it at your parents’ place. …
   al

5. milena July 3rd, 2009 at 12:13 am 5

   hi bojan i really enjoyed reading your comments - right now my first reaction is that it feels like our objects are a kind of externalization of our memories, and that aspects of their physicality provide a very direct link to particular things we remember about events..?

   also as background what you say about forgetting that we ourselves are objects is interesting, there’s some work in cog sci from paul bloom in particular suggesting that in our naive ontology we don’t actually categorise humans as objects.

   the claim is following Spelke’s work on infant object perception that we think of objects in terms of boundedness - one thing doesn’t penetrate another; cohesiveness - if you pull one bit of something the rest comes with it; continuity - objects move through space without disappearing and reappearing elsewhere; and contact - one thing moves when another thing acts on it.

   Notice that humans don’t obey these principles [e.g. humans do move without anything touching them] and in fact as predicted we don’t think of humans as objects and we tend to be surprised when humans move solely in accordance with physical laws, if we see people falling or tripping over for instance, which according to Bloom explains slapstick comedy..

   sorry if this is a bit off topic, it’s just what i’ve been thinking about recently..

6. alf July 7th, 2009 at 5:33 pm 6

   Hi,

   thanks Milena for your comment. I can’t prevent myself of thinking of Turkle’s notion of evocative objects and how their physicality is associated with emotions, feelings, memories that they evoke. We go back again to the Proust’s madeleine that we discussed a while ago with Yasmine (it seems that this is an important theme of this discussion).

   Thanks for reminding us Spelke’s work. I’m wondering if Bojan really meant to consider human beings as objects or if he wanted to highlight our embodiment, the importance of materiality. It’s interesting because his comment is in some way reverse to the actor network theory approach which claims that objects can be actors, that non-humans can be actants… Bojan once to remind us that humans are embodied, “materials” in some ways.

   It reminds me the book by the philospher / cognitive scientist, Andy Clark: Being there.

   http://www.amazon.com/Being-There-Putting-Brain-Together/dp/0262531569/ref=pd_sim_b_12

   I read it a while ago - after I read Cognition in the Wild by Hutchins - and thought the argument really compelling.

   Thanks Milena, I don’t think it’s a bit off topic. On the contrary!

   al

7. Bojan July 10th, 2009 at 5:11 am 7

   Hi…
   Milena and AL, thanks for the great comments. I think the discussion is very interesting and on the point. AL is somewhat right when saying that I might have eluded to the importance of materiality by looking at our embodiment. And Milena put it perfectly by referring to the physicality of objects as a direct link to particular events.

   I’m still struggling in trying to ‘objectify’ myself, and Milena’s reference to Bloom’s and Spelke’s work made me really think about the distinction between ‘things’ and humans. Morbidly enough, a dead person’s body is mainly seen as an object (and treated as such), but what makes it human is the magical power of ‘life.’ And when designing ’smart’ objects (smart meaning they can think), designers supposedly infuse an ‘elixir of life’ into the objects, and the more they ‘behave’ like humans, the more they are seen as humans (giving them a human-like physicality goes a long way in this case). I remember that Hutchins argued how many times technology is designed to mimic or replace certain human behavior, whereas the true potential is hidden in going beyond that in facilitating new activities. Maybe something similar can be said and argued about the e-book readers.

   BTW, just remembered a similar discussion on objects and humans with a friend of mine who was trying to teach me how to meditate. The idea was to achieve de-objectification by, in my view, forgetting about the objects in your possession, and in particular, forgetting about your body and the affordancies/constraints coming with it. I don’t think I ever did that. And now I think this is really off topic

   Best,
   Bojan

8. alf July 10th, 2009 at 7:13 am 8

   Bojan,

   on the materiality of objects, you should definitely go to MOMA to see “Waste Not”. This shows you their “weight” and “power” (at least you can imagine what it meant for Song Dong’s mother and the cathartic power of putting this installation together with him).

   Reading your “morbid” thoughts, I also thought of this great book by Annemarie Mol, The body multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. It is an ethnography of atheroscleroses in a Dutch hospital. Mol claims it is “empirical philosophy” (p.1). She makes a strong ontological claim as she argues that the disease, atherosclerosis is enacted differently through different objects, different practices (the patient, the GP, the vascular surgeon, etc.) and “reality multiplies” (p. 5).

   On the importance of embodiment and flesh:
   “the humane does not reside only in psychological matters. However important feelings and interpretations may be, they are not alone in making up what life is all about. Day-to-day reality, the life we live, is also a fleshy affair. A matter of chairs and tables, food and air, machines and blood. And bodies” (p. 27).

   If I were still sitting in the office next to yours, I will just knock at your door and drop the book for you to peruse. I am now sitting in London and I can’t do more than sharing the main ideas and the link to the book… http://www.amazon.com/Body-Multiple-Ontology-Practice-Cultural/dp/0822329174

   Or you wait until you come to London or I come and visit in NY…

   I guess this is one of the limit of “building space with words”

   al