Symposium program
This two-day conversation highlights the double lives of objects—their local, intimate, and concrete quality as they reside in museums and their global, ubiquitous, and permeable virtual representations in digital media. It investigates the structures of knowledge and emergent network systems whose architectures and formal characteristics facilitate our encounters with objects. Despite the growing interest in object-based ontology and the material turn in fields like art history, anthropology, and political science, objects continue to challenge—and even defy—our desire to tag, interpret, and systematize their form and content.