I am exploring the deep attachments people have to specific objects. What do these things express, represent, replace or fulfill, and what drives the desire and passion for them? How do contemporary notions of personal identity, self representation and social interaction and memory connect to these objects?
Object of Personal Significance
What is your most emotionally precious personal possession?
(If you could “save” only one inanimate thing, what would it be?)
Can you describe it, or post a photo or video to share it?
How and where did you get it?
What does it mean or represent to you?
Do you keep it on display or is it private in your home?
Is there anything else you’d like to share to help us understand your attachment to it?
Object of Desire and Collections
Do you collect anything, and if so, please tell me about your collection(s)?
When did you start collecting?
Approximately how many related objects are there in your collection?
Have you any ideas about WHY you collect this type of object?
What material object do you currently most desire?
Are you actively searching for it, and if so, how, where and how often do you pursue this?
June 15, 2008 at 5:11 am
I collect things from dumpsters. Mostly electronics things — things I image are animate but temporarily voiceless — wishing, if they could just speak loudly enough to be removed from their current fate. I occasionally take the inanimate — but usually for more practical reasons. I have boxes of this stuff. Boxes. The technologies we throw away are much more interesting than the ones we keep.
I desire the idea of finding more than the objects. I think that’s why of this stuff is still in boxes. It is a surprise to open then from time to time and to remember the possibility that each suggests.
June 16, 2008 at 12:55 am
I love the potentially animate, temporarily voiceless objects you attempt to rescue from their mute existence! A lovely empathy and creative impulse.
Do these “suggested possibilities” act as calls to action, as journal entries for old ideas, or as souvenirs of another time or state of mind? Or something else entirely? Amusement?
Your boxes remind me of Andy Warhol’s time capsules, though he never re-opened any of his. Still, the idea that he had to create them, store them and preserve their contents suggests a similar hope that a future life for them might evolve.
This has since come true, when the MOMA and The Whitney joined forces to create the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, where they are now being opened, catalogued and studied.
Somehow I think the magic would be in the opening, not the studying of them.
August 18, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!