What Object?

A Research-in-Progress symposium this weekend at MIT
Objects are at once physical bodies, grammatical constructions, and philosophical abstractions. We obsess over objects of desire, objects of affection, and objects of scorn; we encounter found objects, objets d'art, object lessons, and the occasional objection. In short, we are awash in objects, objectives, and objectification; the discourse of objects can be both concrete and endlessly expansive.

(Sounds like Philippe Starck's mid-life conundrum, doesn't it?)

Our object-riddled and thing-populated world, then, urges us to keep talking. This is precisely what we hope this meeting of Research-in-Progress will foster: continuing dialogues about how objects work in our world, how they don't work in our world, what they do, and, fundamentally, how they keep us in conversation with one another. How are our practices – artistic, architectural, scientific, academic, everyday and otherwise – continually informed by objects? And how do the objects of our practices necessitate overlap with other kinds of practices? Or, alternatively, when do we reject objects? And to what ends?

Full info here