Photo illustration courtesy Untidy Objects.
Can a “living sculpture” prompt new theories about the political and legal claims of the nonhuman?
A “living sculpture” on the University’s campus that includes water and vegetation is also a social intervention, prompting viewers to consider the fact that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights. This project will introduce “augmented reality” technology to the sculpture and study the way it alters viewers’ responses to the sculpture’s propositions.
Untidy Objects, which introduces emergent growth and multispecies co-mingling, is both a sculptural and political proposition. Since the advent of this multi-year installation, a living sculpture adjacent to the Logan Center developed in conjunction with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the population of constituents has radically increased. What is left out is the capacity for humans to perceive the very real connections across species and the stakes of acknowledging a politics beyond a human body as a measure for rights. When one expands their senses to include what surrounds and co-constitutes them, questions of who has legal and political rights grows complicated. This at a time when mixed reality technologies are highlighting porosity between our material realities and virtual realities. This site — which constantly changes — not only provides significant technological challenges, but our requirement for technological open space positions our work in the middle of a property battle over the Internet. If the Internet has been a story of centralization and disempowerment, the incipient power struggles around emerging AR tools and platforms both raises the stakes and offers an opportunity to do the opposite: distributed, collaborative, and fundamentally unbound interaction in messy, real spaces. This project allows us to see if we can push a new technology in ways that would allow humans to perceive property, rights, and obligations, in proximity to joy, survival, play, dirt and code.
Lecturer in Visual Arts
University of Chicago
Amber Ginsburg creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present-day situations, as well as engages present-day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects toward the continuities and ruptures in...
Associate Professor and Chair of Sculpture
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sara Black has worked broadly as an artist, artist-teacher, arts organizer, and curator. Her artwork uses conscious processes of building, craft, and/or material transformation as a time-based method; she uses diseased wood, ecosystem-specific trees, inherited building materials or other...
Lecturer in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Media Arts and Design, and the College
University of Chicago
Marc Downie is a Scottish-born digital artist. His pioneering approach to digital art combines three signature elements: non-photorealistic computational imagery; the incorporation of body movement by motion-capture and other means; and the autonomy of artworks directed by artificial...
Professor of Criticism and Interpretive Theory
University of Illinois
Samantha Frost is Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines how our ideas about embodiment shape our understanding of...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
At this event the Untidy Objects research team will continue gathering data from guests' engagement with the sculpture, noting their observations and responses to a range of discussion prompts.
These discussions focused on "vital norms" in relation to the Untidy Objects sculpture. How do the “things that matter” to the sculpture shift how we think about political rights and obligations?
This event invited participants to join a series of discussions and field experiments exploring interspecies relations and visitors' responses to the Untidy Objects sculpture.
In this feature for the Chicago Reader, graphic artist Coco Picard interviews the scholars and artists involved with the Untidy Objects project.
This Newcity feature explores the inspiration for the Untidy Objects sculpture at the Logan Center.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
At this event the Untidy Objects research team will continue gathering data from guests' engagement with the sculpture, noting their observations and responses to a range of discussion prompts.
These discussions focused on "vital norms" in relation to the Untidy Objects sculpture. How do the “things that matter” to the sculpture shift how we think about political rights and obligations?
This event invited participants to join a series of discussions and field experiments exploring interspecies relations and visitors' responses to the Untidy Objects sculpture.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
In this feature for the Chicago Reader, graphic artist Coco Picard interviews the scholars and artists involved with the Untidy Objects project.
This Newcity feature explores the inspiration for the Untidy Objects sculpture at the Logan Center.
