Yesterday's Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things - June 4th

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Autopsies Research Group Study Day
Friday, 4 June 2010, UCL (University College London)

Roberts G08 Sir David Davies Lecture Theatre [campus map]

Sponsored by The Film Studies Space: The Centre for the Cultural History of the Moving Image

This event is free and open to all.

To register for the study day, simply send a email to deadobjects@gmail.com

Yesterday's Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things is looking like a must attend event and best of all, its free. The day is part of the Autopies Project, exploring how objects die and we are talking about TalesofThings and giving a live demo in the 3-4.30 session.

Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media--the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example--the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought with it the disappearance of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to ‘modern life.’

Responding to recent work in cultural history, spatial studies, and 'thing theory,' this stuy day reflects on the ends of objects, raising questions of modernity, obsolescence, memory, collecting and recording. How can critical theorists and cultural historians participate in the reflexion on the ends of objects—from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night?

This study day on ‘Yesterday’s Objects’ will investigate the everyday objects—the fridges, typewriters, and jukeboxes—that have irrevocably changed our lives. Invited papers will explore how these objects have refashioned and reimagined our work, home, and leisure spaces.

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"Yesterday's Objects: The Death and Afterlife of Everyday Things"

Friday, 4 June 2010

9 a.m. Coffee and Welcome

9:30-10:45, Session One, Chair, TBA
Keeping Yesterday's Objects: Museums and Collections

--“Video Game Culture- Making the Same Mistakes With a New Medium”
Mark Carnall, Curator, Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy, UCL

--“Status Anxiety, or Missing the Pictures: Film Performativity in the Museum Space”
Jenny Chamarette, Department of French/Fitzwilliam College, University of Cambridge

11:00-12:30, Session Two, Chair, Jann Matlock, UCL
Lost Objects/Objects at Risk

--“Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, Loss, and Materialist Filmmaking”
Martine Beugnet, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh

--“Slide Tape: An Abandoned Technology”
Mo White, Fine Art, Loughborough University

--“Documents of Barbarism: Saving the Comic Book as Symbolic Object”
Ernesto Priego, Department of Information Studies, UCL

12:30-1:30 Lunch Break

1:30-2:45, Session Three, Chair, TBA
Filmic Afterlives

--“The Brave Little Toaster from Print to Film: Obsolescent Appliances and Capitalist Allegories”
Margaret D. Stetz, Women’s Studies and Humanities, University of Delaware

--“Godard’s Dictations: The Histoire(s) du cinéma and the Erasure of Memory”
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Film Studies, University of Edinburgh

3:00-4:30, Session Four, Chair, Lucia Vodanovic, Media and Communications, Goldsmiths
Dead Object Crises and Telling Things

--“The Temporality of Waste”
Will Viney, Humanities and Cultural Studies, The London Consortium

--“Vinyl Farewells?”
Richard Osborne, Popular Music, Middlesex University

--“Tales of Things: Memories, Stories and Archives of Everything”
Andrew Hudson-Smith, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL

4:30-5:45, Round Table: Yesterday’s Objects
The Autopsies Research Group in Discussion

6-7 p.m. Drinks Reception, Location TBA

How to Add Anything to the Internet of Things: Creating the Geography of Everything

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Every object in existence can be tagged with any media, linked to tell a story, to recount its memories in a read/write environment and tweet when its interacted with.





Its a concept that takes a bit of time to take in, for example a wall in Camden Town, London, tweeted me last week when someone replayed its memories of having a Banksy painted on it. That wall is part of the Internet of Things via the project TalesofThings.

The best part is, its incredibly easy to add objects. You simply sign up at talesofthings.com and then take click on 'add a thing'. This takes you to a form where you give your object a name, for a example 'Andy's Mug' or 'BBC Broadcasting House' are some of things we have added so far. You then type in a short story, or tale, linked to that object and upload a photograph to the site.

Everything has a location so we are creating a 'Geography of Everything', a brave claim perhaps but one that develops a new a new kind of geography, the geography of things. Simply click on the map to set a location, your object will now become part of the 'World of Things' map.

Thats it, your object will now become part of the Internet of Things and will be able to tweet, have new stories/tales added as its passed on, sold or interacted with. It is all part of a Social Web of Things or SWOT as its known.

Each thing created gets assigned a unique 'qrcode' which can be attached to your object. For example, we have attached a qrcode to our office here in CASA which visitors scan using our free iPhone app. This 'virtual guest book' allows our office to recall the story of CASA and the people that pass through our doors. You can print out your codes via the site and attach them to anything.

Any media can be added to you object, the clip below provides a glimpse of the system running via our recent link up with Oxfam via Future Everything, complete with the iPhone RFID reader:





Anything, anywhere can be tagged with any media, do take a look at the beta version of TalesofThings, we are very proud of the work and as the Ericsson Labs blog noted, this is really part of the social web of things, it will be trillions of tags around in a couple of years...