Posts tagged objects

“what is an object? Philosophers are always saying, “Well, just take a chair for example.” The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more. What is a chair? Well, a chair is a certain thing over there … certain?, how certain? The atoms are evaporating from it from time to time—not many atoms, but a few—dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible. So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately. In the same way, to define the mass of a single object is impossible, because there are not any single, left-alone objects in the world—every object is a mixture of a lot of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations.”

–Richard Feynman,The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. I Ch. 12

“This is the concept behind Uninvited Guests, a short film released last month by design firm Superflux. Commissioned by ThingTank, a research project focused on the design and business of the Internet of Things, the film offers cautionary musings on the future smart home. How will we coexist with the data-gathering, service-oriented objects supposedly designed to make our lives better? As Thomas’ smart bed incessantly relays messages to his phone, prompting him to get to sleep by 10PM, it’s impossible not to feel his frustration. You root for him as he struggles to win his life back, concocting ways to dupe the objects—and his children—into thinking he’s accomplishing his daily goals. Ultimately, however, it’s hard to celebrate his successes as a true triumph of human agency, as he’s now locked into leading a double life: the one he wants to live, and the one his objects demand of him.”

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/man-vs-smart-house-a-cautionary-tale

“The meditations on objects I offer here will indeed often suggest that they can be seen as what in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe would have been called ‘emblems’, allegories of human life, implying pocket homilies on love, time, hope, error, striving and death. As such, they give us work to do as well as being merely available for us to work on. And yet, their power comes entirely from us.”

http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2012/12/paraphernalia.html