User:Niek Hilkmann/Project Proposal

The Deal

Few 'things' are as vague and attractive as the past. It is a concept that is never really present, though it's traces are everywhere. The most appealing the past might be it's tangibility. One can never physically encounter what has happened in everyday life, but concrete objects collecting fungi in moist basements can help reconstruct the past. Inanimate objects are the stuff culture and history is built upon. Once they were made and used by actual living beings with thoughts and feelings, but at one point in time they simply stopped being issued. Even though these objects and the persons who used them are not literally being seen on the street anymore, they still have a very real place within society. Historians and collectors are attracted to the objects and the stories behind them. They are able to project certain feelings and ideas upon them. Sometimes, such ideas lead to very elaborate narrative constructions, which are retold and reshaped over and over again and get new uses within current times. Nowadays, many of these different interpretations can be found on the web and in digital libraries. Each one is equally represented and just as true as an historic document as the next one. As such, the past appears to be a relative subject outside the reach of 'truth' in the broadest sense of the word and 'the human mind' in the slightest.

However, something gets lost within these new narratives and the web constitutes this cultural division. The true meaning of objects, by which I mean it's particular essence, shifts between romantic speculation and sentimental relativism. One question I continually ask myself is what it means when an object becomes redundant or is being reissued, as I demonstrated by repurposing 20th century elitist avant-garde music and everyday cartoon VHS-tapes. While I am not a psychologist, I think that I probably contemplate on this because I wonder what it means to be redundant and reissued myself. At one point in time I will die and leave behind traces that might help to construct a narrative. I wonder what it essentially means to get lost in translation nowadays. This is both my main thesis question. To answer it I will look at what kind of historical sources are enforced by the web and how they constitute a form of metaphysical estrangement that differs from a pre-digital one. Certain specified objects such as the dodecaeder, the narwal tooth, John Dee's speculum and the image of the dodo will be taken as an historical example of this shifting of meaning and essence.

I will turn my research into something concrete by means of an installation incorporating sound, image, light and animatronics. Objects of the past are orchestrated and manipulated to narrate a false, mutated history in the form of a 10 minute show bearing similarities to the type that can be found in amusement parks. One important factor in this show is the use of animation, for anthropomorphism is the start of any form of romantic misinterpretation. I should point out that every form of misinterpretation consists within a triangle of the narrator, narration and reader. When enforced upon an object, we encounter the start of misinterpretation. This entire process will be present in my final work. Everything together will tell the story of the struggle between mankind and it's past and future by means of insensitive objects.

Proposed Literature

• Evil Media, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, 2012.
• Anti-Media: Ephemera On Speculative Arts, Florian Cramer, 2013.
• Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 2000.
• Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Graham Harman, 2002.
• Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Graham Harman, 2005.
• The Democracy of Objects, Levi Bryant, 2011.
• Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost, 2012.
• Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett, 2009.
• The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, B. Reeves, B and C. Nass, 1996.
• Machines and mindlessness: Social responses to computers, C. Nass, C and Y. Moon, 2000.
• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier, 2011.
• The Future Of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym, 2002.
• When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, 1996.
• The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Andersen, 1981.
• Sein Und Zeit, Martin Heidegger, 1927.
• The Brave Little Toaster from Print to Film: Obsolescent Appliances and Capitalist Allegories, Margaret D. Stetz, Opticon 1826, 14: 21-26, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/opt.aj, 2012.
• The Brave Little Toaster, Thomas M. Disch, 1980.

Key Texts

• Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Graham Harman, 2002.
• The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, B. Reeves and C. Nass, 1996.
• Evil Media, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, 2012.
• Sein Und Zeit, Martin Heidegger, 1927.
• The Brave Little Toaster, Thomas M. Disch, 1980.