The Bureau of Suspended Objects: Objects in Use

The Bureau of Suspended Objects: Objects in Use PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781364476755
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book accompanies "The Bureau of Suspended Objects" installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, opening January 28. The objects in this book correspond to the second section of the display: objects that belong to me or that I grew up with at my parents’ house. They come from bookshelves, desks, attics, and shoeboxes, and have been owned long enough to have acquired some emotional value – thus becoming more than an anonymous product at the store. However, it’s possible that this aura of meaning is visible only to their owners.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects: Objects in Use

The Bureau of Suspended Objects: Objects in Use PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781364476755
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book accompanies "The Bureau of Suspended Objects" installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, opening January 28. The objects in this book correspond to the second section of the display: objects that belong to me or that I grew up with at my parents’ house. They come from bookshelves, desks, attics, and shoeboxes, and have been owned long enough to have acquired some emotional value – thus becoming more than an anonymous product at the store. However, it’s possible that this aura of meaning is visible only to their owners.

The Bureau of Suspended Objects at CJM: New Objects

The Bureau of Suspended Objects at CJM: New Objects PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781364476786
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This book accompanies "The Bureau of Suspended Objects" installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, opening January 28. The objects in this book correspond to the first section of the display: new items recently purchased from large stores such as Walmart, Target, Big Lots, and Hobby Lobby. These objects function as blank receptacles, waiting to be invested with meaning. One can perhaps imagine a child growing up with one of these items resting on the mantle, and the ineffable nostalgic quality the object would later take on for that person. Some of these objects are in fact designed preemptively for nostalgia, with faux-antique finishes and references to older products.

The Archive of the Bureau of Suspended Objects

The Archive of the Bureau of Suspended Objects PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781364713102
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The Bureau of Suspended Objects is a one-person organization and archive that investigates discarded and unwanted objects. These objects are “suspended” in several senses: The B.S.O. has suspended them from their trajectory to the dump or landfill, but additionally, they are items whose meaning and value are also in flux after the act of discarding.Simply put, this book repeatedly asks the question: what accounts for the existence of this object?Research at the B.S.O. stems from the assumption that we are estranged even from those objects closest to us, or that their inner workings and past lives are too often experienced as opaque and inaccessible. As such, the B.S.O. endeavors to learn how to read and understand an object on its own terms – to understand why and how it came into being. More specifically, the mission of the B.S.O. is to:- Photograph, research, and archive as many discarded objects as is reasonably possible.- Reframe the objects not as items in a static and irreversible category (trash) but as 1) inflection points in an ongoing flow of material and 2) specific products of constantly changing economic contingencies.- Use photography and research to embody an attitude toward objects that is at once fascinated, sorrowful, and diagnostic.- Articulate the role of images in manufacturing our desire for objects, explore the interchangeability of objects with their images, and use the archival function of photography – its protest against “time’s relentless melt” (Sontag) – ironically, given that nothing discarded ever truly goes away.This project was made possible through a residency at Recology SF, the waste-processing facility for San Francisco. Since then, the B.S.O. archive continues to suspend objects from dumpsters, sidewalks, and anywhere that unwanted objects may be found. The archive is online at www.suspended-objects.org.

How to Do Nothing

How to Do Nothing PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612197507
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

Archive Everything

Archive Everything PDF Author: Gabriella Giannachi
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262549247
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
How the archive evolved to include new technologies, practices, and media, and how it became the apparatus through which we map the everyday. In Archive Everything, Gabriella Giannachi traces the evolution of the archive into the apparatus through which we map the everyday. The archive, traditionally a body of documents or a site for the preservation of documents, changed over the centuries to encompass, often concurrently, a broad but interrelated number of practices not traditionally considered as archival. Archives now consist of not only documents and sites but also artworks, installations, museums, social media platforms, and mediated and mixed reality environments. Giannachi tracks the evolution of these diverse archival practices across the centuries. Archives today offer a multiplicity of viewing platforms to replay the past, capture the present, and map our presence. Giannachi uses archaeological practices to explore all the layers of the archive, analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson's !Women Art Revolution project, a digital archive of feminist artists. She considers the archive as a memory laboratory, with case studies that include visitors' encounters with archival materials in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. She discusses the importance of participatory archiving, examining the “multimedia roadshow” Digital Diaspora Family Reunion as an example. She explores the use of the archive in works that express the relationship between ourselves and our environment, citing Andy Warhol and Ant Farm, among others. And she looks at the transmission of the archive through the body in performance, bioart, and database artworks, closing with a detailed analysis of Lynn Hershman Leeson's Infinity Engine.

Inhabiting the Negative Space

Inhabiting the Negative Space PDF Author: Jenny Odell
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 3956795814
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A hopeful meditation on how periods of inactivity become reimagined as fertile spaces for design and how we might use this strange moment in history. "Hi, everyone. I'm speaking to you from my apartment in Oakland, though I've virtually placed myself in the rose garden nearby." Artist and writer Jenny Odell hadn't originally planned to deliver the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's 2020 Class Day Address from her living room. But on May 25, 2020, there was Jenny, framed by a rose garden in her Zoom background, speaking to an audience she could not see about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty in a global pandemic. Odell's message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen and expand our individual and collective attention and sensitivity to time, place, and presence--in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our "new" virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments. Odell unspools this hopeful meditation in Inhabiting the Negative Space, where periods of inactivity become reimagined not as wasted time but fertile spaces for a kind of design predicated less on relentless production and more on permitting a deeper, more careful look at what exactly is demanding or tapping our time and attention, and how we might use this strange moment in history to respond.

Object to Be Destroyed

Object to Be Destroyed PDF Author: Pamela M. Lee
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621564
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Pamela M. Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs. Although highly regarded during his short life—and honored by artists and architects today—the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) has been largely ignored within the history of art. Matta-Clark is best remembered for site-specific projects known as "building cuts." Sculptural transformations of architecture produced through direct cuts into buildings scheduled for demolition, these works now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, and film and video documentations. Matta-Clark is also remembered as a catalytic force in the creation of SoHo in the early 1970s. Through loft activities, site projects at the exhibition space 112 Greene Street, and his work at the restaurant Food, he participated in the production of a new social and artistic space. Have art historians written so little about Matta-Clark's work because of its ephemerality, or, as Pamela M. Lee argues, because of its historiographic, political, and social dimensions? What did the activity of carving up a building-in anticipation of its destruction—suggest about the conditions of art making, architecture, and urbanism in the 1970s? What was one to make of the paradox attendant on its making—that the production of the object was contingent upon its ruination? How do these projects address the very writing of history, a history that imagines itself building toward an ideal work in the service of progress? In this first critical account of Matta-Clark's work, Lee considers it in the context of the art of the 1970s—particularly site-specific, conceptual, and minimalist practices—and its confrontation with issues of community, property, the alienation of urban space, the "right to the city," and the ideologies of progress that have defined modern building programs.

Archive Fever

Archive Fever PDF Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226143361
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
As a depository of civic record and social history whose very name derives from the Greek word for town hall, the archive would seem to be a public entity, yet it is stocked with the personal, even intimate, artifacts of private lives. It is this inherent tension between public and private which inaugurates, for Derrida, an inquiry into the human impulse to preserve, through technology as well as tradition, both a historical and a psychic past. What emerges is a marvelous expansive work, engaging at once Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marxist materialism in a profound reflection on the real, the unreal, and the virtual.

Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice PDF Author: Arie Wallert
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892363223
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.

Paul's Case

Paul's Case PDF Author: Willa Cather
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Paul is a schoolboy, described as tall and thin with strange eyes. He is facing the headmaster and several of his teachers, with whom he does not have a good relationship. All of them, in one way or another, find him difficult and disturbing to teach.