CSI of Things

• Friday 20 February, 10am-4.30pm
• Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre (LT3), Battersea Campus
• The CSI of Things - 
crime scenes and suspect objects

All objects incorporate traces and signs of their insertion into spatial and historic realms. They condense aspirations and participate in dramas of use and abuse. In this symposium we have chosen to regard objects/things as 'clues'. In fictions there are 'smoking guns', 'MacGuffins' and accessories - components of scenarios and objects of desire and repulsion. 'The Crime Scene' in which our objects are located may not involve a literal crime - it may be any environment in which we seek an explanation for how things come together to create or disturb coherent fictions.

Detectives and forensic scientists (1) share with archaeologists and design historians various processes of induction and deduction to 'explain' or recover an incident or status quo; they try to make objects 'speak'.

Here, we are interested in methods of investigation that reveal an understanding of things and their complex functions. This relates to the story of detection - predicting outcomes from evidence or reconstructing a story from traces at the 'scene of the crime'. We will also explore, through theory and practice, some of the imaginative acts of interrogation and 'animation' that make these objects and scenes 'speak' and perform.

Finally ...in a belief that all objects and spaces can be made to reveal themselves... the 'Antiques Roadshow' format will be used to attempt to detect the significance of some fairly random objects - feel free to bring something...

Speakers include

• Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature, with a focus on crime and gothic horror
• Simon Hollington, artist and part of Hollington & Kyprianou; 'Colonel Mustard-Lead Pipe-The Dining Room'
• Tim Edensor, author of Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005); 'Wild Speculation: Things in Ruins and Ruined Things'
• Ilona Gaynor, artist, writer and flim-maker; her work takes form as complexly precise plots and schemes, Owner and Director of The Department of No; 'Aesthetics of Precision'
• Brian Dillon, writer, editor of Cabinet magazine and Reader at the RCA on MA Critical Writing in Art & Design; 'CSI of Things does Antiques Road Show'

Convened by Barry Curtis, Naomi House & Monika Parrinder

Details for the day:

• Please be punctual; starts 10am-4.30pm (lunch 1-2pm)
• The Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre is in the Dyson building, Howie Street entrance and up one flight of stairs: map

Barry

readers

• alien phenomenology or what its like to be a thing - bogost
• hyperobjects timonthy morton
• quadruple object - graham harman
• spectralities reader

• Forensics is an interesting way in to the way of thinking about objects - the sheer complexities / intensities of a simple object
• think of all objects as suspicious, needs examination, has a history, detached from its own context that needs to be deconstructed
• rich narrative potentials

• the notion of "property" - what belongs to people
• properties as props, to emphasise narrative elments
• things which audit u
• objects have time, events, may be venerated for being attached to someone famous, resurrected, resignified, their provenance, what context, status, traces, where they touch history
• places ensembles, crime scenes
• obsolescence
• displaced object which shows traces of contact which implicates a person in a crime
• Read: “Morelli, Freud And Sherlock Holmes: Clues And Scientific Method” By Carlo Ginzburg
• Mise en scene studies - creating scenario to explain character, the objects testify to or contradict the nature of characters - objects u pick up on when watching a film

Notes

• an idea for a lecture when you speak about things and have a taster reel of images related to teh story