#objecthood

[13051431]

Tablet 01 & Tablet 02

tin, rust, pigment, plaster

2024

[grupaok]

Léon Ferrari, Reflections, 1963–64

[thelonguepuree]

The purpose of an object is, commonsensically, something other than the object: satisfying my hunger is a purpose external to the quesadilla.

Nicholas Brown, Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

[grupaok]

Jimmie Durham, Stoning the Refrigerator, still 1996

[alunah-lalunah]

Is The Book A Book?

What Immanuel Kant is pointing to is something very real. Your senses do not give you ready-made objects. They give you changing signals, light, color, sound, pressure, all unfolding in time and space. From that shifting input, your mind groups, stabilizes, and says this is a “thing” that continues. That is why you experience a book, a ball, a person, instead of a chaotic stream. Objects as you experience them are constructed. The continuity you feel, the “same thing over time,” depends on how your mind organizes what comes in. Without that, the world would not appear as stable objects at all.

But the claim says that objects “don’t necessarily exist as objects,” as if they were purely invented. That goes too far. There is a reason your mind can successfully group signals into a book or a ball. The world has regularities, stable patterns, structures that persist and interact. If there were no such structure outside you, your mind could not reliably track anything. You would not survive, and your perceptions would not match up with action. The world provides structured input. Your mind organizes that input into objects.

Neither side alone is enough. If you only had raw input with no organizing, there would be no objects. If you only had organizing with no real structure outside, it would not work consistently. Arthur Schopenhauer emphasizes the first side, that the world as you experience it is representation. You are always dealing with a constructed version. But even he does not mean that there is nothing behind it. He means that what you call an “object” is already shaped by your way of seeing. Objecthood and continuity are not simply given, they are achieved by your mind.

The clean way to see it is that bjects are not purely out there, and not purely in you mind. They are the meeting point between a structured world and a structuring mind. And the final grounding point is simple. The stability of the world you experience is real enough to live by, but it is not raw reality untouched. It is reality as held together in a way your mind can manage.

[einskai]

new poem: "the beginning and end of perception"

[lsc-collection]

Rev-->Table Digital DNA

At creation, the digital design files used to make the table are permanently embedded in its surface. We wrote a compression algorithm to fit the CAD file in a QR code with room for degradation, and laser etched it into a durable aluminum plate. You don't even need to rely on the Internet being around to access the data—it's all right there in the code. Any smartphone can scan the two-dimensional barcode to retrieve the stored DXF files.

[lsc-collection]