At a time when faulty oil rigs pose overwhelming challenges, when concrete barriers continue to brutally define boundaries, when engineered food has forever altered what people eat, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics embarks on a two-year exploration of the material world. In the face of virtual realities, social media and disembodied existences, the center will focus on the material conditions of our lives and examine “thingness,” the nature of matter.

From the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2013, the Vera List Center (VLC) will organize public and transdisciplinary conversations, roundtables, workshops, and on-line programs, involving scholars, artists, policy makers, journalists and cultural workers, around the topic of “thingness.” The VLC will appoint two fellows whose projects will further the understanding of this subject. And it will engage with New School students and faculty through classes, and writing initiatives. The proceedings of these investigations will inform a book on thingness, the third in a biennial series of publications.

Russian Constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko once declared that “our things and our hands must be equal.” More recently, political scientist Jane Bennett has spoken of “vibrant matter” and called for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between objects and people that may provoke more responsible, ethical and ecologically sound politics. In the course of four semesters, thingness will be dissected, and thematic program clusters will be formed around topics such as forensics, ecology, speculative materialism, and biology.

How can the conventional dichotomy between subject and object be overcome? What is the impulse sustaining this separation? What is the relationship between material commodity and immaterial network? Since the past shapes the future – down to the chemical exchanges in our brain that develop the pathways of future exchanges and therefore determine our thinking – how do we account for simultaneity of consciousness (memories, knowledge, projections), and what role do physical objects and phenomena play? What interventions are possible in systems of objects?

These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this far-ranging inquiry, drawing from New School faculty and students, and bringing to them scholars, thinkers and artists from outside the immediate community. As always, all conversations involve the public and serve the VLC’s mission to facilitate new forms of civic engagement.

Visit Archive to learn about our previous cycle on Speculating on Change.