Memories Made Manifest through Online Viewing
An object is merely matter, but within the substance of that object there lies much
more—memories. No matter the purpose of an object, it has the ability to project its own
biography which will trigger memories within an individual, or many other people who have
come into contact or association with that object. The virtual exhibition @theobjectproject, aims
to prod the memories of the viewers as they associate with the photographed objects. In addition,
the photographed objects now have two lives: their original material form, and their new
photographed, online form.
The object biography and life cycle has been discussed by Karin Dannehl in her chapter,
“Object Biographies: from Production to Consumption”. In terms of analysing the objects in the
exhibition through the object’s biography or life cycle, the ideas of Karin Dannehl have been
taken a step further. She describes that the object biography includes “a tightly defined, finite
time frame, [where there is a] focus on the subject against a context, and the express purpose of
highlighting exceptional or unusual features.”1 Although @theobjectproject uses the diptych to
highlight the unusual features of some of the selected objects, the project does not quite express
the objects’ biographies. The approach used is closer to that of Dannehl’s idea of the “life cycle”,
although more theoretical. For Dannehl, the object biography is not suitable to objects of
everyday use or those which are deemed ordinary and mass produced. To understand these
objects, the “life cycle model” is used. The life cycle model “postulate[s] a beginning and an
end, with an intervening period of growth and decline, where start and finish respectively mark a
generational change.”2 The objects in @theobjectproject, possess a theoretical life cycle because
not even the artists, who have collected the objects, know or can trace all the objects back to their
beginning. Furthermore, now that the objects of the collection have been photographed and
placed online, they are given a second online life with no end. Dannehl describes how certain
objects “not only exist in their manifestation as physical things, but also in the documentary
appendage that accumulates with every stage of their life cycle.”3 By documenting the artists’
collection as photographs, the objects then live double lives, and their parallel lives can “go in
different directions”4 as one life remains with the material object, and the other is now an online
photograph. Subsequently, this second life begins a documented history, as the online comments
serve as the memories that others have received from or projected onto the photos.
By perusing the photographed and catalogued objects, one may note that there is nothing
exceptional about the objects themselves. The documenting of ‘ordinary’ objects was done
purposefully so that the viewers can relate to these objects as something they may have known or
remembered seeing. This relational value to the object, which in turn re-enlivens memories, is a
Karin Dannehl, “Object Biographies: from Production to Consumption,” in History and Material Culture: A
Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, edited by Karen Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2009), 124.
2
Ibid., 124.
3
Ibid., 126.
4
Ibid., 126.
1
crucial part of the exhibition. Even if an object is ordinary, it still has a story to tell, and likewise,
that story can speak to many people. In this way, object hierarchies are abolished and thus,
memory and mystery begin. As the objects are viewed, the visitor to the site is able to speculate
about the object’s life: who may have created it, played with it, wrote it, read it, and even why
the object may seem so out of the ordinary in Western culture today? All these questions and
more are meant to be raised, but not all of them can be answered fully.
By showcasing objects from the collections of three artists, the exhibition aims to have
the present to communicate with the past, while meditating on the future as well. The objects are
ordered beyond the temporal, and as Susan Stewart’s chapter “Objects of Desire” describes, “all
time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection’s world.”5 Although the objects
collected for display on Flickr are from the past, they mark a memory for the viewer in the
present and allow meditation on the future. For a collection, Stewart encourages the reader to
“discern what the collection is about”.6 The collection on Flickr is open to every individual who
wants to assign some type of value to the objects he or she sees. Although there is no real
consumer value to the photographs, the “exchange value” is important. Stewart says that “what
must be suppressed here is the privileging of context of origin, for the elements of the collection
are, in fact, already accounted for by the world.”7 If this idea of decontextualization is taken
further into the realm of the internet and Flickr, then the origin of the objects are not as important
as what the visitors see and project onto the images. As Alois Riegl explains in “The Modern
Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin”, there are various values that a monument may
possess, and accordingly, the objects displayed in @theobjectproject have values that vary. Riegl
states that intentional commemorative value aims “to preserve a moment in the consciousness of
later generations and therefore to remain alive and present in perpetuity.”8 The online images
give the visitor the ability to recall a specific period in time which relates to their own personal
moment. A case in point is Dave Kemp’s Ticket for a movie I didn't make it to on September 11,
2001. By viewing this image, one is able to recall a particular moment in time which may be
remembered quite vividly.
The internet serves as a means to store and process information, similar in theory to how
the human brain stores and processes information and memories. Since the origin of the objects
photographed is not always disclosed, there is a disconnect from their original context.
However, this disconnect is refreshing, rather than an art historical dilemma. Visitors to
@theobjectproject are encouraged to speculate on the objects they see, and allow these objects to
make them think about their own personal lives, and not merely about the lives of the objects or
of the artists. By being photographed and displayed on Flickr, the object is further severed from
Susan Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the
Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 151.
6
Ibid., 154.
7
Ibid., 162.
8
Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin,” Oppositions 25, trans. Kurt W.
Forster and Diane Ghirardo, (1982): 38.
5
its origin. The visitor is encouraged to view the objects “within a context that is framed by the
selectivity of the collector.”9 Through the objects selected the members of @theobjectproject
found themes running throughout which: memory and the past, changes in social norms and
technology, childhood and pre-internet life. It was not until the objects were compiled together as
a collection that these themes began to reveal themselves. It is then the visitors to the exhibition
who are asked to make the objects their own by projecting their own stories and biographies onto
the objects in the form of comments, tags and their reuse on blogs and other social media.
Therefore, although there is only a total of 60 images on display on Flickr, there are an infinite
number of memories and biographies for the objects of @theobjectproject.
9
Stewart, “Objects of Desire,” 152.