Susanne Küchler
Biographic Data
| ID | 109161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susanne Küchler |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susanne |
| FAMILY NAME | Küchler |
| SIGNATURE | KÜCHLER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8114-3593 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 438 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
"The Mathematics of Man" by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay "Les mathématiques de l'homme," originally published in 1956, is the least known of all his publications. It is also arguably his most prescient, capturing the enduring possibilities and latent pitfalls in anthropology's relationship with mathematics that have continued to beset the discipline to the present day. The aim of presenting a new translation of this essay is to prompt reflections on the changing landscape of…
Time and Its Object
This chapter explores the politics of visuality in the context of the lives of the Nalik people of northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea that is sympathetic to the ‘complexity and reality of people’s lives and thoughts’. It investigates how ubiquitous technologies such as the internet and digital heritage technologies impact visual systems in a Melanesian society, a region where traditional image-making itself is considered under threat of loss …
The Social Life of Materials
Reflections on Art and Agency
This chapter discusses the potential impact of a particularly prominent example of contemporary ‘mathematical’ art upon an anthropological approach to artworks. Contemporary knot sculpture was ‘discovered’ by mathematicians who enthused about its intuitive application of mathematical principles whose abstract nature was recognized as hindering both research and teaching. The nature of evidence was found not in images or words, but in the material…
Social Life of Materials
Material Translation and Its Challenges
Malanggan
Malanggan is the generic name for motivic compositions that are carved from wood, woven from vines, molded from clay, or danced and sung into rhythmic patterns. Compositions are gifted to mark the loan or sale of land in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Nowadays, artifacts once used in ritual are often sold to collectors
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object ? a box, pen, effigy and cloak ? this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography…
Differential Geometry, the Informational Surface and Oceanic Art
Graphic pattern (e.g. geometric design) and number-based code (e.g. digital sequencing) can store and transmit complex information more efficiently than referential modes of representation. The analysis of the two genres and their relation to one another has not advanced significantly beyond a general classification based on motion-centred geometries of symmetry. This article examines an intriguing example of patchwork coverlets from the maritime…
Twenty Years On
the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two. Defined in this manner, the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences themselves. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5)
Reflections on meta-representations
Social Life of Materials
Additive Technology and Material Cognition
The paper reflects on the theory of material cognition the advent of 3-D printing arguably calls for, pointing to the topology implicit in additive fabrication that invites a vision of the world in which the environment is no longer outside, but inside material structures that envelop in a self-referential manner and that work by aggregating and assembling, much like the layers of an onion. The questions that additive technology invites are not j…
Beyond objectification
Comment on LEMONNIER, Pierre. 2012. Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
On Open Access and journal futures
Sociality
Social memory in the age of knowledge
The prototype in 20th-century art
This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic lan…
Empathie avec la matière
Empathie avec la matière : comment repenser la nature de l'action technique.L'importance des matériaux est souvent minimisée dans l'analyse des systèmes sociaux et techniques alors qu'ils façonnent les bases mêmes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l'attention sur la nature des matériaux et des actions calculées qu'ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des m…
Technological Materiality
This article introduces a new field of research, which is presently opening up around an abundance of technological solutions that strive to connect, bring together and solidify immaterial streams of information in a material medium. Such engineered materials and technical processes that make customization possible at the stage of materials production do more than reveal to us, through a kind of retro-projection, the social labour and its multipl…
The String in Art and Science
String has played a formidable, though largely unacknowledged role in twentieth-century art and science. Its rise as a material technology was made possible by the fact that string embraces a material way of thinking, one that is uniquely capable of binding together what is invisible with what is phenomenal to experience. String today thus signals the resurgence of a chemical revolution, which, in parallel to a modernity fashioned by a mechanical…
Des matières qui travaillent
De nouvelles matières font désormais concurrence aux artefacts et aux fonctions selon des modes appelés à déstabiliser notre façon d'envisager la nature du monde social et culturel que nous habitons. Dans cette note de recherche, nous soulignons la nécessité d'étudier l'introduction et l'adoption de ces nouvelles matières et des nouvelles technologies auxquelles elles font appel pour comprendre les répercussions que ces innovations auront sur la …
Handbook of Material Culture
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas Objectification - Christopher Tilley Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjornar Olsen Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations THE BODY…
Clothing as Material Culture
In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in theories of fashion, but have rarely directly addressed the material qualities of clothing. By contrast, traditional studies of dress have focused on textiles but often neglect the larger cultural context within which dress becomes consumed as clothing. This book fills a major gap by combining these two ‘camps’ through an expressly material culture approach to clothing. In s…
Image et anthropologie
Que ce soit dans les sociétés dites traditionnelles ou au sein de notre propre tradition, on ne peut plus concevoir une ethnologie des objets sans la construction parallèle d'une esthétique. Inversement, aucune esthétique ne semble désormais possible sans que les questions posées par l'étude des images ne dépassent le modèle traditionnel de l'histoire de l'art pour devenir anthropologiques. Ce numéro provoque la rencontre de recherches qui, à par…
Handbook of Material Culture
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas Objectification - Christopher Tilley Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjornar Olsen Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations THE BODY…
Malangan
La transmission culturelle d'une forme d'art ephemere, designee du terme indigene de Malangan, comprenant des sculptures, des danses, une ceremonie funeraire et un echange ceremoniel. A la fin de la ceremonie les sculptures realisees sont brulees ou vendues a des Europeens et aucune trace materielle n'en subsiste. A partir de donnees recueillies en Nouvelle-Irlande, Archipel Bismark, Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee
Malangan
Certain museum collections are not the result of "salvage anthropology" alone, but of the operation of "gift to god systems," as sale became an alternative means of removing gifts from circulation. Objects that are made to be dismantled in a process of sacrifice confound time not through permanence, but through renewal, and create time not as history, but as memory. The production of memory, and the difference it creates in society and culture, i…
Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects
This paper examines the deposition and destruction of ritual artefacts in Oceania and positions the act of riddance in the ritual economy of sacrifice. A popular alternative to object destruction involves the sale of the object as a way to render it absent, and turning it into intellectual and image-based property, while at the same time eliciting the possibility for unspecified returns within an exchange of which we have become a part quite unkn…
Technological Materiality
This article introduces a new field of research, which is presently opening up around an abundance of technological solutions that strive to connect, bring together and solidify immaterial streams of information in a material medium. Such engineered materials and technical processes that make customization possible at the stage of materials production do more than reveal to us, through a kind of retro-projection, the social labour and its multipl…
Differential Geometry, the Informational Surface and Oceanic Art
Graphic pattern (e.g. geometric design) and number-based code (e.g. digital sequencing) can store and transmit complex information more efficiently than referential modes of representation. The analysis of the two genres and their relation to one another has not advanced significantly beyond a general classification based on motion-centred geometries of symmetry. This article examines an intriguing example of patchwork coverlets from the maritime…
Empathie avec la matière
Empathie avec la matière : comment repenser la nature de l'action technique.L'importance des matériaux est souvent minimisée dans l'analyse des systèmes sociaux et techniques alors qu'ils façonnent les bases mêmes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l'attention sur la nature des matériaux et des actions calculées qu'ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des m…
Imaging the Body Politic
Politiques du corps : le nœud dans l'imaginaire océanien. - Dans les cultures du Pacifique, le nœud est loin de posséder seulement une valeur fonctionnelle. L'acte de nouer ne lie pas seulement deux choses mais aussi deux concepts - le visible et l'invisible. Dans ce texte, nous étudions l'élaboration visuelle des noeuds dans des effigies austronésiennes qui nous apparaissent comme l'illustration de différents modes d'exister et de penser : l'un …
The Modality of Time-Maps
Beyond objectification
Comment on LEMONNIER, Pierre. 2012. Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
"The Mathematics of Man" by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay "Les mathématiques de l'homme," originally published in 1956, is the least known of all his publications. It is also arguably his most prescient, capturing the enduring possibilities and latent pitfalls in anthropology's relationship with mathematics that have continued to beset the discipline to the present day. The aim of presenting a new translation of this essay is to prompt reflections on the changing landscape of…
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object ? a box, pen, effigy and cloak ? this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography…
Twenty Years On
the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two. Defined in this manner, the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences themselves. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5)
Additive Technology and Material Cognition
The paper reflects on the theory of material cognition the advent of 3-D printing arguably calls for, pointing to the topology implicit in additive fabrication that invites a vision of the world in which the environment is no longer outside, but inside material structures that envelop in a self-referential manner and that work by aggregating and assembling, much like the layers of an onion. The questions that additive technology invites are not j…
Social memory in the age of knowledge
The prototype in 20th-century art
This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic lan…
Clothing and innovation
Malangan
La transmission culturelle d'une forme d'art ephemere, designee du terme indigene de Malangan, comprenant des sculptures, des danses, une ceremonie funeraire et un echange ceremoniel. A la fin de la ceremonie les sculptures realisees sont brulees ou vendues a des Europeens et aucune trace materielle n'en subsiste. A partir de donnees recueillies en Nouvelle-Irlande, Archipel Bismark, Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee
Malangan
Certain museum collections are not the result of "salvage anthropology" alone, but of the operation of "gift to god systems," as sale became an alternative means of removing gifts from circulation. Objects that are made to be dismantled in a process of sacrifice confound time not through permanence, but through renewal, and create time not as history, but as memory. The production of memory, and the difference it creates in society and culture, i…
Leben in Linie, Muster und Farbe
Art and Identity in Oceania
To Remember the Faces of the Dead
The liquidation of material things
Thomas' paper and manuscript are ambitious. He aims at nothing less than opening up for discussion fundamental concepts which have informed archaeological writings to date. While in principal laudable and exciting, the chosen concepts - time, culture and identity - are broad, each one on its own of daunting complexity. The vastness of the project is handled by setting up an opposition at the outset between the Cartesian and modernist reading of t…
Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects
This paper examines the deposition and destruction of ritual artefacts in Oceania and positions the act of riddance in the ritual economy of sacrifice. A popular alternative to object destruction involves the sale of the object as a way to render it absent, and turning it into intellectual and image-based property, while at the same time eliciting the possibility for unspecified returns within an exchange of which we have become a part quite unkn…
Binding in the Pacific
The paper argues that the prevailing use of the term ‘template’ in the investigation of the reproductive and generative capacity of artworks in Oceania is profoundly misleading and in need of replacing. Tracing a similar dilemma in New Genetics and Biology, the paper argues that the contemporary fascination with the knot as a model of non‐linear, topological systems enables us to look at the importance of binding in the creation of the figural in…
Papua New Guinea
Rethinking Textile
The advent of the “intelligent object” has happened almost unnoticed. A new sensing, networking, and automating technology has been created with the sole purpose of vivifying “dead” objects by making them responsive to human need and emotion. This article examines the appearance of wireless technology in “smart” clothing and discusses its implications for our understanding of personhood
Imaging the Body Politic
Politiques du corps : le nœud dans l'imaginaire océanien. - Dans les cultures du Pacifique, le nœud est loin de posséder seulement une valeur fonctionnelle. L'acte de nouer ne lie pas seulement deux choses mais aussi deux concepts - le visible et l'invisible. Dans ce texte, nous étudions l'élaboration visuelle des noeuds dans des effigies austronésiennes qui nous apparaissent comme l'illustration de différents modes d'exister et de penser : l'un …
Clothing and innovation
Clothing as Material Culture
In recent years social scientists have become increasingly interested in theories of fashion, but have rarely directly addressed the material qualities of clothing. By contrast, traditional studies of dress have focused on textiles but often neglect the larger cultural context within which dress becomes consumed as clothing. This book fills a major gap by combining these two ‘camps’ through an expressly material culture approach to clothing. In s…
The Modality of Time-Maps
Handbook of Material Culture
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES In the Matter of Marxism - Bill Maurer Structuralism and Semiotics - Robert Layton Phenomenology and Material Culture - Julian Thomas Objectification - Christopher Tilley Agency, Biography and Objects - Janet Hoskins Scenes from a Troubled Engagement - Bjornar Olsen Post-structuralism and Material Culture Studies Colonial Matters - Peter van Dommelen Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations THE BODY…
The String in Art and Science
String has played a formidable, though largely unacknowledged role in twentieth-century art and science. Its rise as a material technology was made possible by the fact that string embraces a material way of thinking, one that is uniquely capable of binding together what is invisible with what is phenomenal to experience. String today thus signals the resurgence of a chemical revolution, which, in parallel to a modernity fashioned by a mechanical…
Des matières qui travaillent
De nouvelles matières font désormais concurrence aux artefacts et aux fonctions selon des modes appelés à déstabiliser notre façon d'envisager la nature du monde social et culturel que nous habitons. Dans cette note de recherche, nous soulignons la nécessité d'étudier l'introduction et l'adoption de ces nouvelles matières et des nouvelles technologies auxquelles elles font appel pour comprendre les répercussions que ces innovations auront sur la …
Technological Materiality
This article introduces a new field of research, which is presently opening up around an abundance of technological solutions that strive to connect, bring together and solidify immaterial streams of information in a material medium. Such engineered materials and technical processes that make customization possible at the stage of materials production do more than reveal to us, through a kind of retro-projection, the social labour and its multipl…
Empathie avec la matière
Empathie avec la matière : comment repenser la nature de l'action technique.L'importance des matériaux est souvent minimisée dans l'analyse des systèmes sociaux et techniques alors qu'ils façonnent les bases mêmes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l'attention sur la nature des matériaux et des actions calculées qu'ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des m…
The prototype in 20th-century art
This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic lan…
Social memory in the age of knowledge
Sociality
Additive Technology and Material Cognition
The paper reflects on the theory of material cognition the advent of 3-D printing arguably calls for, pointing to the topology implicit in additive fabrication that invites a vision of the world in which the environment is no longer outside, but inside material structures that envelop in a self-referential manner and that work by aggregating and assembling, much like the layers of an onion. The questions that additive technology invites are not j…
Beyond objectification
Comment on LEMONNIER, Pierre. 2012. Mundane objects: Materiality and non-verbal communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
On Open Access and journal futures
Art (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · History (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (6 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 works)