Sep 2017
Public Events / Workshops
Object America
OBJECT AMERICA explores the idea of “America” through everyday objects. The aim is to use comparative research and observational methods—which may range from the scientific to the absurd—to expose unseen histories and speculate about the future of the country as a concept. The contemporary global media landscape is fast-moving and undercut by “fake news” and “alternative facts” which demands that students and researchers build a repertoire of strategies to assess and respond to sources of information. For the first phase of OBJECT AMERICA launching in the fall of 2017, we invited Ellen Lupton, Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, to choose an object for this investigation which she believed would represent “America” into the future (she chose the Model 500 Telephone by Henry Dreyfuss designed in 1953). Researchers will investigate this object through different disciplinary lenses — including art, climate science, cultural geography, data visualization, economics, history of mathematics, medicine, media theory, material science, music, poetry, and politics — in order to posit alternative ways of seeing. objectamerica.org

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Jul 2017
Publication
Talking About Seeing
The publication combines a transcript of the panel discussion “Talking About Seeing” with experimental research drafts from students who investigated observational practices in the context of the everyday at Parsons School for Design and the Institute for Art and Art Theory at the University of Cologne. It is published digitally and free to the public. MORE

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Dec 2016
Symposium
Observational Practices
and the Everyday
This symposium was organized by Selena Kimball & Pascal Glissmann: The OBSERVATIONAL PRACTICES LAB at Parsons, The New School, in collaboration with Karina Nimmerfall: The LABORATORY FOR ART AND RESEARCH, Institute for Art and Art Theory at the University of Cologne. MORE

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Oct 2016
Launch
Observational Practices Lab
The Observational Practices Lab’s mission is to create dialogue about observational practices across disciplinary boundaries; we are focused on the questions of how observational practices work, what different disciplines might learn from another’s approaches to observation, which methods are best suited to which subjects and why, and how observation itself can create communities and initiate a new view of our everyday reality. MORE