Thinking with Materials and Objects

Date/Time
Date(s) - 08/05/2019
16:00 - 18:00

Instructor
Inge Römgens

Location
2.041

Categories

• Workshops

Organizer: Inge Römgens

Inge Römgens is a teacher and researcher at University College Maastricht. She teaches two art theory courses: ‘Introduction to Art’ and ‘The Presence of Art,’ and the projects ‘Think Tank’, ‘Applied Research & Internship Project’ and ‘Research Studio’. Her research focuses on perspectives on the role of a theatre artist in research-based education. Under the working title ‘Unpacking gifts of the theatre artist in research-based higher education’ she studies the (possible) role(s) of artists in contemporary research universities. In her project she explores boundaries between artistic and academic practices, asking if, and how these go together.

Workshop description:

In this workshop, we will focus on the role of materials in your research project.

Artists, architects and designers have long known the importance of materials in their work. In academic disciplines, within the social sciences and the humanities, there has also been an increasing interest in the role of materials, both as sources of knowledge and as ‘actors’ in understanding social relations. Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013 ) for example stresses the importance of thinking with materials when he talks about making processes as a correspondence between you and the materials with which you work. A ‘making project’ as Ingold calls it, is not simply a linear process starting from an idea of what you want to achieve, and with a supply of materials ending up with the intended form you aimed for. Instead, his theory of correspondence stresses the agency of materials to shape and change ideas and outcomes of a project.

Therewith a project becomes a correspondence, like two people writing messages to each other and responding to what the other says; thereby as the conversation unfolds moving in a certain direction together. Thinking in this way about research is interesting, because it points at how what you are working with influences what you are doing and what you might achieve.

In order to practice ‘thinking with materials’ and find out what your materials can tell you at the start of your research, we will use the anthropologist and science and technology studies scholar Joseph Dumit’s ‘implosion exercise’.

What are the methodology and/or methods that the workshop will cover?

Thinking with materials and objects.

To participate in this workshop, you will need to prepare the following material(s):

• Read Joseph Dumit’s (2014) article “Writing the implosion: teaching the world one thing at a time” Cultural Anthropology2, pp.344-362. Focus specifically on pages 344-356 (until ‘Twist 3’)
• Do the following ‘Implosion exercise’

In his article Dumit starts from the premise that objects are made of imploded stories and histories that therefore objects are ‘unpackable’; that they can be teased open to show “the sticky, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues” (Dumit, 2014, p.349). This is what you need to do for one object that you have encountered at UCM so far.

Please take the following steps:

1. Choose any one object that you have come across at UCM so far. It can be something as simple as your water bottle or laptop, or a concept you learned in a course.
2. With this specific object in front of you, list – in whatever way you want – the different stories you could tell about it. Don’t do any research. Just think about what you know using Dumit’s different dimensions (see pp.351-352). Also indicate how certain you feel about the knowledge you are listing. Do you feel like you know an answer in detail, have a fairly good idea, make a guess or actually don’t know something. If you think you know something or have a fairly good idea, also indicate where your knowledge comes from: how do you know?

This results in what Dumit calls your ‘braindump’ (p.354)

1. Next, you need to create what he calls a ‘gap-map’ (p.355). After reflecting on where your knowledge came from, think about how and where you could get answers to questions that you still have. Where would you go to, who would you need to speak to, to find answers to remaining questions?
2. Prepare to present your findings from this exercise in class. If possible bring your object or some form of documentation of the object (e.g. a picture if you cannot bring the thing itself. In that case, be aware that of course pictures are objects in themselves…!).

At the end of this workshop, you will have obtained the following skills:

• An insight in possible approaches to materials and objects as ‘agents’ in a research process.
• Critical and analytical thinking skills
• An awareness of the situatedness of knowledge and of what might inform specific perspective(s)
• Critical reflection

Booking is available from 23 April at 18:15.

Bookings