To Search

This program is filled to capacity. Register for the wait list.

Friday, September 25, 1-6:45 pm
Saturday, September 26, 10:30 am-4 pm

How do objects circulate across physical and digital landscapes and how does this movement affect their status? Do we search differently with objects in the humanities and social sciences? How do we discover, attend to, and channel the network of ideas they help generate?

This two-day conversation highlights the double lives of objects—their local, intimate, and concrete quality as they reside in museums and their global, ubiquitous, and permeable virtual representations in digital media. It investigates the structures of knowledge and emergent network systems whose architectures and formal characteristics facilitate our encounters with objects. Despite the growing interest in object-based ontology and the material turn in fields like art history, anthropology, and political science, objects continue to challenge—and even defy—our desire to tag, interpret, and systematize their form and content.

Investigate these issues through facilitated conversations, creative examinations, and other exploratory engagements.

FRIDAY

1:00-2:30: Session 1

• Double Take with Holly Hughes and Marc Redfield
  Explore a single object from two disciplinary perspectives
• Object Lesson with Gina Borromeo and Kevin Smith, moderated by Ijlal Muzaffar
  Examine the disciplinary treatment of objects
• Drawing Perspectives with Nicholas Carter and Amy Leidtke
  Practice observational and mark-making skills as used in the studio and the field

3:00-4:30: Session 2

• Double Take with Bethany Johns and Graham Oliver
  Explore a single object from two disciplinary perspectives
• Object Lesson with Kate Irvin and Thierry Gentis, moderated by Steve Lubar
  Examine the disciplinary treatment of objects
• Drawing Perspectives with Leslie Hirst
  Practice observational and mark-making skills as used in the studio and the field

5:00-6:45
Critical Encounters with David Joselit and Rosemary Joyce, with respondent Jane South

6:45-8:00
Cocktail reception
with Works in Process by Clement Valla, David Kim, Mikhail Mansion, and Maralie Armstrong
Artists, designers, students and scholars share the object-based roots of their work from performance to experience design

SATURDAY

10:00
Coffee

10:30-12:00: Session 3

• Teachers' Lounge with Julie Golia
  A forum to explore the pedagogy of primary sources
• The Work of Art in the Age of Code with Clement Valla, David Kim, Mikhail Mansion, and Maralie Armstrong
  Examine how technology materializes and dematerializes the object
• Sleuths and Fiction: How to Bring Museum Objects Back to Life with Brian Markovitz and Emily Avera
  As detectives in the dusty attics of museum collections, Emily and Bryan will talk about their efforts to reanimate obscure objects by replicating them across a historicized spectrum of truth and fiction.

12:00-1:00
Lunch on your own

1:00-3:00
Critical Encounters with Ivan Gaskell and R. H. Quaytman, with respondent Vazira Zamindar

This program is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is part of a collaboration between the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University and the RISD Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design focusing on the new and evolving field of object-based teaching and research.