Ever since I took a class on material culture and the significance of things and objects in our lives, I’ve started taking note of relevant readings I come across. For those interested, below is a partial list:
Objects of Despair: Inspired by Roland Barthes, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s monthly column examines contemporary artifacts and the mythologies we have built around them.
Fake Meat | Mirrors | Mars | Drones | The 10,000-Year Clock
Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth (more on The Guardian’s “Concrete Week”)
The Unfortunate Fate of Childhood Dolls by Rainer Maria Rilke
AirPods Are a Tragedy
Thinging the Real: On Bill Brown’s “Other Things”
Sum Effects: “Personal or real, tangible or intangible, durable, hard, soft, consumable, or perishable: my grandmother owned none of it. Goldyne Alter died with no possessions.”
A janitor rescued migrants’ possessions from a border facility’s trash. Now they’re art.
Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. by Sherry Turkle
Friendly Floatees
Great Pacific garbage patch
Plastic: an autobiography by Allison Cobb
Curating the Anthropocene: “Imagine a future archeologist on a dig in what was once downtown Los Angeles, excavating, exposing layers of history, like the paleontologists at the La Brea Tar Pits are doing today, finding bones of saber-toothed cats, mammoth, and dire wolves. What does the archeologist of the future find?”
The System of Objects by Jean Baudrillard
My master thesis on The Bed
