Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects

Panasonic 8 track player (A Panasonic 8-tracks music player found last week at trashed next to the flea market in Geneva)

Morning read on "Material World" (found via):

"Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects

This project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media--the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example--the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought the phasing out of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to "modern life." What is the modern, then, without film projectors, typewriters, and turntables? How has the modern changed as trolley cars disappeared and hot air balloons were converted into high-risk sport rather than the demonstration of national pride in science and a crucial tactical mechanism of wartime? But what will our twenty-first century entail without mixmasters, VCRs, or petrol-driven automobiles? Does the "modern" in fact program the death of objects? What is the significance of death for things that live only through such a paradoxical program of planned obsolescence? How can cultural historians and theorists participate in the reflection on the ends of objects, from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night."

Why do I blog this? Great questions asked in the project, lots to digest from the website and the weblog

Besides, this excerpt reminded of a discussion with Basile about his gf's interest in how objects die/vanish. The first picture above depicts this topic at the general level (a now defunct technical-object lineage) but the place I found it (next to a trash) exemplifies the death of a particular object (that I actually saved). There are ten two levels for objects death: as the "lineage" level and the instantiation level.

The picture below shows the traces of a dying object (and not necessarily the whole lineage though) in Montreal: