100 Hours of Things: Materiality, Expertise and Encountering Objects

Elizabeth Haines (Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Science Museum)

Dr Juliette Kristensen (Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Matthew Paskins (Department for Science and Technology Studies, UCL)

Abstract

Since October 2013, the members of the 100Hours project, founded by Kate Smith and Leonie Hannan at University College, London, have each been interrogating a specific item from the Museums Collections at UCL. We have made repeated visits to our chosen objects, punctuated by discussion sessions with a variety of researchers. As a group we have experimented in accumulating ‘one hundred hours’ of looking and thinking. This panel presents the reflections of Liz Haines, Juliette Kristensen, and Mat Paskins on participating in that process. In three short discussion pieces, we outline will our perspectives on this collective interrogation of the methods and meaning of materiality in historical work.

Liz Haines, will be considering the aesthetics of various material epistemologies and how they might structure our relationships to historical artefacts.

Juliette Kristensen will explore the critical tensions between the call for a flat ontology and the viscerality of phenomenological experience, through focusing on the concepts of attention and touch. Mat Paskins will talk about a meteorite from Augusta County, Virginia, and the life-worlds which have gathered fleetingly around it.