Fiona is Senior Lecturer in Museum Studies in the School of Arts at Birkbeck, University of London. With Raiford Guins she is editor of The Object Reader (2009), and her research on audiences, museums, and the senses culminated in Art, Museums and Touch (Manchester University Press, 2010). She has just begun a new book entitled […]

Gabriel is an Irish-Nigerian Londoner, a writer and broadcaster. His radio play The Long, Hot Summer of ’76 won the Richard Imison Award; his recently completed novel Vauxhall won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize at the London Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge […]

Dale is an internationally renowned design practitioner, a futurist and academic. She advocates innovative design through the synthesis of foresight, research, and practice to initiate people-centred design. introducing narrative insight and understandings as we shape our future, her creative and strategic guidance inspires visionary design cultures and projects in design and technology teams across a […]

When we stop talking about the object, does it disappear? Perhaps this is the moment when the object itself comes into existence; when we are taken out of the equation. And what for imagination? Perhaps the object has one. But what is ‘imagination’, other than a human word for something that humans experience themselves. This […]

“_____________________________” The more they don’t speak the more we want to hear them. The more we yearn to know what they are saying behind our backs. This is a strategy, this dumbness. This is a considered non-participation in human chit-chat. But are they bugging us, tracing and tracking us? Sending information about us elsewhere? This […]

What have the chairs been saying as we have sat here sharing words of the possibility that humans will always speak in the place of objects? Like the ventriloquist throws words into the mouth of his dummy, can this be a metaphor for our everyday complacency for doing the same to the objects alongside us? […]

And, What Is The Relationship Between Idea and Object. In particular, a discussion concerning the immaterial object of labour. Those who become object in public when doing mundane activities such as wiping tables, cleaning bollards, are becoming invisible. Is this invisibility where they want to be? My body is an object, if I say it […]

Objects free you, objects tie you down: which do you believe? Your new shoes are on the table, the ladder is being walked underneath and that horseshoe is hanging the wrong way round. It’s all in the mind and in our cultures, yet it pushes our behaviour in peculiar directions. Objects are activated by narratives […]

Exploring what constitutes atmosphere and how this unseen force emanates. Don’t you think there are spaces that already hold their own energy? Such as the UFO museum in New Mexico or the Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall. You have to be there to feel it. You can’t feel it through the technology of the computer […]

Nostalgic objects, objects that make you go “ahh”, objects that you can’t explain why but you succumb to their triviality, except simply…because. A PEZ dispenser. Grand Designs. A snow globe, the perfect trivial object. Trivial makes everything important. The fun-factor, the entertainment, the enjoyment, the non-importance we pull from these trivial things, to what impact […]

Before we are able to enter language, objects bring us into contact with the world beyond our mother’s body. We use the same apparatus again to deal with a loss; we attach ourselves to their objects. But how can we choose what to keep and what to throw away? This is hard. This is why so […]

How can it be that we find a human emotion with an object? Is this an energy inherent in the being of the object, or is it always going to be something we bring to it, that we place onto it? It is impossible to say, impossible to know, impossible to even compare the subjective […]

“Objects are the clasps on the pockets of space” said Malcolm de Chazal. What do the lines between objects look like; can they be tied together with string or would that tie them down? In the process of mapping we erase what is there. Are objects what they are because of their connections? Hosted by Galen […]

“Does an object have to exist in space or, if I talk about a tree that I saw (it was summertime, it was full in bloom) is that an object?” This discussion discusses the intangible object, the object of language. Is this an object? Language is human, so how can this be of the object itself? Maybe our language is […]

Don’t let the truth get in the way of a great story. Imagined objects are snuffed out when they are realised by someone else in the film of the book. What is this dissatisfaction? We must hold pictures of objects in our minds akin to characters, and this failure to represent our own narratives means […]

Is everything now so conceptual that we are forgetting what it feels to actually make something? David Hockney offers a relief to view his output in which there is more concern for making than meaning. And what of skills; they have had to reshape themselves as demand is for brands over high quality craftsmanship. We […]

Unexplained human emotions drive you to gather, collect and care for multiple things. Or you despise objects cluttering and covering and invading your space. Or you gather and disperse in fluctuations of ownership. What does this trait say about you? What do these interactions reveal of your understanding of objects, or is it something deeper, […]

The boundaries are not so solid. Categories such as ‘word’ and ‘picture’ apply to…what exactly?  Where is meaning: emotional response or literal definition? Somewhere in the middle. Could you draw the meaning of an unknown word intuitively? And how is it that English cows say “Moo”, yet French cows say “Maa”? This is a conversation […]

London vs Seoul. The cuteness of Gilbert + George; have you ever seen them dining in Dalston? This discussion attempts to move a cup with telekineses. And covers pigs, pigheads, pyschosis, truth and literal meaning. Are objects in urban environments extensions of our bodies? Perhaps we are mediated by objects through our relations with them. We continue to misunderstand […]

Is painting a noun or a verb; is painting an object or something that artists do? Alternatively, can painting be an understanding, a knowledge or an experience happening beyond either of these; could painting be a conversation about a painting? And is it something intrinsically artistic, concerned with the nature of being an artist, or is […]

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