Launch Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects”

The new Lise Meitner Group "Coded Objects" will investigate the form of processes and the objects they produce. At a moment when the design and distribution of information has become a dominant driver of world politics and economy, the formal and material implications of “codes” often remain unnoticed or unchecked—as do concurrent shifts of agency in the object world. What would it mean to take Coded Objects not as stable denominator, but as a methodological investigation of form-giving operations and the matter of design? Coded objects as method of refraction will question any assumptions of "neutral" technology or immaterial bureaucracy: addressing the forming of values through aesthetic and material means promises to unveil uncomfortable friction and productive affinities necessary for this research to bear on the present.

At the launch on January 24, Anna-Maria Meister will first introduce the group’s approach with some examples, followed by a round-table discussion with KHI research group leaders Hannah Baader and Hana Gründler, director of the Photothek Costanza Caraffa and KHI director Gerhard Wolf. By addressing the two terms defining the title—coded and objects—we will try to open up questions and establish future connections. Asking for example what is at stake in the distinction between coding vs. coded, how objects are belatedly coded for scholarly use, how one reads and unreads them, or even what constitutes an “object” in diverse contexts and how their objecthood shifts, destabilizes or materializes are some first attempts at the larger question of how we might work toward a methodological definition of coded objects as a working thesis.