To be Frank

The Robert Frank who produced his paper road movie The Americans was an object-oriented photographer. His was a flat ontology of object-actants. His documentary was of people yes, but also flags, jukeboxes, crosses, cigars, hats and cars – a Latour litany of human, non human and unhuman objects vibrant, doing things in the world. Those …

EcoTone 1: I object, it certainly does matter

Following Robert and Paul‘s lead, this is my abstract for the EcoTone event: Recent movements towards a renewed focus on objects within philosophy are far more than just an intellectual fad or even metaphysical debate. Object-oriented ontology has the potential to be a radical critical method. Its stress on the actuality of objects, connected and nested within …

Software tunnels through the rags ‘n refuse

Text of talk given at the Platform Politics conference in Cambridge 13.05.11 It took New York police officer, William Barker two hours to find Homer Collyer dead in his apartment in March 1947. Barker had to crawl  through a window into a second-story bedroom, burrow his way through newspaper bundles, empty cardboard boxes lashed together …

Just checking in

Not sure if anyone’s following this stream but the rags ‘n refuse are running a little offline at the moment as I build a lit review. The fragments will return as I begin to muse more on object oriented photography – the next and fun bit.