Rob Walker's Blog, page 2
February 20, 2012
Significant Objects in Stories
According to Transmedia Digest, there are only types of significant objects in stories. We beg to differ!
January 31, 2012
January 2, 2012
Never Liked It Anyway
Never Liked It Anyway is a new website "where once loved gifts from once loved partners get a second chance… We've all been there. We've all got stories to tell and things to sell. This is a place full of marvelous deals. And tales of the mild, mutual and monstrous."
The elevator pitch: Significant Objects meets "Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty."
December 12, 2011
Check out a high school’s Significant Objects-inspired experiment
Check this out:
Inspired by the work of Significant Objects … and how they got that way, Grade 11 students (ELA 20-1) from Wm. E. Hay High School are embarking upon a journey of their own to see where it will lead them.
In September they chose their “insignificant” objects and began writing stories about them to create their significance. On Friday (Dec. 9) we began publishing the stories along with the items on eBay to see if people will buy them because of their newly created significance.
Pretty cool, eh? Needless to say, we’re flattered and excited by this undertaking. Check out the students’ objects & stories at http://stettlerssignificantobjects.blogspot.com/, consider making some bids via their eBay store — and help ‘em spread the word.
Check out a high school's Significant Objects-inspired experiment
Check this out:
Inspired by the work of Significant Objects … and how they got that way, Grade 11 students (ELA 20-1) from Wm. E. Hay High School are embarking upon a journey of their own to see where it will lead them.
In September they chose their "insignificant" objects and began writing stories about them to create their significance. On Friday (Dec. 9) we began publishing the stories along with the items on eBay to see if people will buy them because of their newly created significance.
Pretty cool, eh? Needless to say, we're flattered and excited by this undertaking. Check out the students' objects & stories at http://stettlerssignificantobjects.blogspot.com/, consider making some bids via their eBay store — and help 'em spread the word.
November 28, 2011
The Migration of Objects
The Brooklyn-based Proteus Gowanus gallery recently announced an exhibition on "The Migration of Objects." They've sent out a call for submissions. Here's the idea:
When we think about migration (as we have been doing all year), we tend to focus on people and creatures, the mobile inhabitants of the planet. But life and motion create products and byproducts: tools, waste, the implements of culture. These are often the things that drive us onward in our migrations. Their stories are ineluctably connected with our own. At the points where our stories intersect with obects, much is revealed, not only about our personal trajectories but also about our precarious relationship with the environment.
Do you have an object whose story you would like to share? An heirloom, an artwork, a toothbrush, a stone? An object which has inspired you, dominated you, educated you, exalted or degraded you? For our second exhibition of the Migration year, we invite you to lend us your object and include with it everything you know about its migratory story.
These objects will be our starting point for a three-month exploration of the Migration of Objects. We will view them as independent beings with stories of their own, stories that began before the object's encounter with you and that will likely continue long after you part. Your story of the object may start with you but may necessarily migrate into the economic, the industrial, the political, the historical, the geologic, the environmental and so on.
If accepted, Proteus Gowanus will send you instructions on how to document your story and when to drop off your Object and story.
September 26, 2011
Joost Swarte
From the March 21 (2011) New Yorker.
September 22, 2011
Tweet from Bruce Sterling about our redesign
Bruce Sterling (@bruces)
9/22/11 12:40 PM
http://t.co/1vFi6Ev *People are always claiming they'll archive a dead creative website, but these guys actually did it.
December 13, 2010
Significant Hiatus
Readers, as we mentioned in passing recently, this site is going to be quiet for a while, as the Significant Objects team holes up in its secret laboratory facilities to make the final tweaks and arrangements leading up to the publication of our book, to be published by Fantagraphics next year. We'll be back at that time with a variety of mind-boggling surprises and entertainments.
You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook in the meantime, so you'll be among the first to know when we gear up the machinery of Significance again; or sign up here for notification via email the next time new material appears on this site.
December 10, 2010
Pie-shaped Container
Thumbscribes Story Number Two.
[This is the second of two stories created for Significant Objects by participants in Thumbscribes, a collaborative-writing platform. Thumbscribes is auctioning this object , and will give proceeds to a charity or nonprofit of its choosing.]
I had a friend who once gifted a SPAM jigsaw puzzle. It's the kind of gift that lets a person know how you feel. It says, "You're a compressed mystery meat conundrum and I don't mind getting my hands dirty." My gifts rarely speak so candidly.
My mother doesn't eat sweets anymore. The doctors told her they were killing her. It used to always be so easy to buy her presents. Cakes, pies, cupcakes. I'd just go to the nearest bakery and choose the most delicious-looking thing. Now when I see her for holidays, we share a silence of sweets. And so, the absence of sweetness in my gifts pained me. It threatened to sour our family time, for the memory of sweetness is the sweetest of all things, until custom and overuse curdles it. And then I found this. A void encased in a prison of pastry: a metaphor for life. A savory joke.
At first glance, memories of Katie's plum-colored face, wheezing, struggling for air as she convulsed on the floor with her hands on her throat, filled my mind. Diabetic shock: overbearing sweetness can be so bitterly destructive at times. After her attack she would often remind me that stressed spelled backwards is desserts. In fact, she went so far as to divide the whole world into people who like desserts, and Maoists. After a few glasses of wine she would sometimes shout with righteous indignation, "Let them eat cake." Being in the people-who-liked-sweets category was inherently better than being in the Maoists' camp. That said, I was still a little hesitant about how she would respond to my most recent purchase.
As I was about to give her the present, the New Yorkers arrived like a bumper commercial during the cliffhanger of my gift-giving moment. The dogs raced to the door as my mother rushed gushing to meet my brother and his girlfriend. "Baby Cakes, all the way from the East Village," Serena exclaimed. "Baby Cakes indeed," I thought gleefully as my mother reluctantly refused the sugar-coated gift. Keith insisted she try one, saying the cakes were sugar-free and made with Agave. I looked up startled as I watched my mother slowly bite into the forbidden; that of which we had for so long not spoken. I rushed over, chastising my brother for his ignorance. "Mom can't eat ANY sweets. It makes no difference if it's extracted from cactus or corn." She seemed fine, although visibly unhappy that I'd robbed her of her pleasure. That was when I decided not to give her the pie-shaped container.
Written collaboratively by Thumbscribes users Alex Rendon, Carly, Chris, Jacqueline, lickicon, and Rafael. For a breakdown, view the story on Thumbscribes, and click "view details."
