Arranged Things

Saturday March 21, 12.17.20

Found items, Saturday noon, arranged thusly.

Saturday March 21, 12.16.37

Further indication of a rather polite evening’s activities. Broken bottle, top half. Not smashed. Or smashed into something. But, placed carefully. Arranged things.

Sunday March 15, 16.27.37

Further arrangements. My friend Tod called this one “Larry, Curly and Moe.” Get it?

Friday March 20, 15.21.43

More purposeful arrangements. Capacitors, large ones to handle the switching effects of 12 volt solenoids, placed in a recently assembled circuit board.

Friday March 20, 15.09.18

Burnishing brushes for a Dremel, arranged in their holding bin.

Why do I blog this? Observations that caught my eye. Things arranged with purpose. Thoughtful acts. Practices and constraints in which things assume their “proper” place. Remnants of reviewing old grad school reading lists, especially Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr. It’s a wonderful treatment on the ways in which categories function as embodied social practice. The purpose and utility of boundaries between things, disciplines, people, actions, specifically around organizing, disciplining, classifying, cataloging. All that good taxonomic stuff that we social beings tend to do to order ourselves and our knowledge. If there’s a lesson for me in that book its about unclassification and undisciplining, especially when the boundaries become so accepted that they discipline even in their absence. New things, new futures, innovation mean pushing away from older orders of knowledge and practice.

Anyway.
Continue reading Arranged Things