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Phatic Objects

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By Semiophrenic
So I finally stumbled upon something that reinforces the alternative etymological interpretation of "phatic", specifically in the sense "to show":
During a performance in front of an audience, 3D printers often produce useless objects that serve as pretexts for operating the machines [Figure 3(c and d)]. Usually, these samples are downloaded from the Internet. Known as “crapjects”, a contraction of “crappy” and “objects”, they are printed to make up for a lack of inspiration; the idea that we can print anything petrifies people far more than it liberates them. These objects, created by default, should be referred to as phatic objects from the ancient Greek word phanein meaning “to show”. They represent a ready-made lyophilised version of the possibilities of personal production. The Russian linguist Jakobson (1963) defined the phatic function of language as language for the sake of interaction. In the technical situation imposed by 3D printing, this means maintaining active contact between the operator and the printer. Phatic objects are objects that are printed with no real purpose, a sort of cheat sheet that hides a lack of ideas (Figure 4).
From: Bosqué, Camille 2015. "What are you printing? Ambivalent emancipation by 3D printing. Rapid Prototyping Journal 21(5): 572-581.

Comments

  1. aridedFebruary 2, 2016 at 11:41 AM

    Great! It reminds me of the "printer test page" from 2D printing, or the various "polling" methods used for communication between software systems, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbeat_(computing)

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  2. aridedFebruary 2, 2016 at 1:31 PM

    And not unrelated to my new post on "transitional objects"...

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  3. aridedFebruary 14, 2016 at 2:37 PM

    https://youtu.be/CvLQJReDhic - 15 minute video about composition in film. One of the key issues there is the "focal element." Given our etymological toolkit, it seems that things like "focus" or "harmony" within an image might give us a snapshot of phatics or a "social field" at work. Some interesting examples of the way this in that video, e.g. framing a character in the center (artificial control of the viewer's gaze) versus putting the character off to one side (primal control of the character by other forces). In this way phatic studies might be something similar to composition-in-the-wild.

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