Introduction

When Objects Have Agency. Human hearts are a living object 'gift of life'; and a technological one.Successful transplanted patients give 'token objects'; to the cardiologist who cannot part with them. Here the role of objects is dramatically manifested as they intervene in life processes, inter-relations and the limits of being human.

In stereo, (an illusion) these objects live a kind of half-life, apparently material yet active in unexpected ways and operating out of reach.

Contents

• Collaboration with the Medical Research Team University Health Network (UHN),

Cardiac Transplant Unit, Toronto General Hospital

• Catherine Richards' .IMG Research / Creation  Lab

University of Ottawa

• Transitio_MX 05 - September 21-29, 2013, Mexico City

Biomediciones Festival of New Media Art and Video 

• Exhibition: Still Lives 1 & 2 - September 21-29, 2013

Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico

• Exhibition: Shivering Symposium, May 9-10, 2014

Winnipeg, Manitoba

• UAAC-AAUC Conference 2014 Congrès - October 28, 2014

Toronto

• Exhibition: I'm Afraid to Ask - October 24 - November 7, 2014 

Open Gallery, OCAD, Toronto 

Collaboration with the Medical Research Team University Health Network (UHN),
Cardiac Transplant Unit, Toronto General Hospital

UHN’s Cardiac Transplant Research Program

... Unusual emotional and psychological responses to the life-transforming procedure can produce real distress for some heart transplant recipients, a fascinating new study of a Toronto hospital’s patients suggests. Video interviews with 25 recipients found many had questions about their identity after receiving another person’s heart, felt an intruder had found its way inside them, or experienced an intense, emotional bond with the donor whose death meant they could continue living.
One 50-something woman even said she stopped wanting to have sex with her husband after concluding — despite anonymity rules — her donor had been a man.
“For a while, I felt as if there was an alien in my body … a foreign identity,” another recipient told researchers from the University Health Network (UHN), according to a just-published paper in the journal Health.

The project itself had unusual origins, stretching the usual, evidence-rooted boundaries of health care and shedding new light on a remarkable treatment the world now largely takes for granted. Dr. Heather Ross, the cardiologist who heads the UHN’s cardiac transplant program, said her view of the treatment changed when she began exploring philosophy. The transplant world typically has viewed the procedure in “Cartesian” terms, as a bio-mechanical exchange of spare parts, she notes. The ideas of phenomenology she examined, however, pointed to body and consciousness being closely linked and suggested “we are in a never-ending process of becoming,” said Dr. Ross, who has been working with British philosopher Margrit Shildrick and others.

National Post December 12, 2014 

This project was inter-linked with the Hybrid Bodies project.

More information about this project can be found at the following web site: http://www.hybridbodiesproject.com/

Dr Heather Ross

MD, MHSc, FRCP(C)
Director of Cardiac Transplant
Toronto General Hospital
Toronto, Canada

Dr. Margrit Shildrick

Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production at Linköping University
Adjunct Professor of Critical Disability Studies at York University, Toronto.

Patricia McKeever

Senior Scientist
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital 

Susan Abbey

Director, Medical Psychiatry
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

Jennifer M. Poole

MSW, PhD,
Associate Professor & Academic Co-ordinator, Continuing Education (Social Work)
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

Tokens of gratitude are given repeatedly to the cardiologist, Dr. Ross. by successful heart transplant patients.  They appear to be inconsequential but they bridge the unfathomable: my new heart was never ‘dead’ but was alive/dead; if my immune system defends me, the intruder heart dies and so will I.These objects take on a life of their own and live in Dr. Ross’s office. She cannot part with them,

Catherine Richards' .IMG Research / Creation  Lab, University of Ottawa

Transitio_MX 05 - September 21-29, 2013
Biomediciones Festival of New Media Art and Video  

These objects belong to the cardiologist, Dr. Ross. Their inconsequential appearance betrays their power. Successful heart transplant patients come to the clinic year after year to give these to her. They bind her. She cannot part with them:  “Why are you giving this to me”/ “I’m afraid to ask”. When these objects take on a life of their own, the notion of objects with social agency is hard to resist. On the surface they are worthless, but they set out to bridge the unfathomable: losing your heart in order to live with another’s; if your immune system defends you, the intruder heart will die and so will you; your new heart was never ‘dead’ but alive/dead and now continues alive. These objects are highly charged, attempting o bridge life and death and the borders of what we think ourselves to be.

Exhibition: Shivering Symposium, May 9-10, 2014

Museum of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba

CBC Radio Interview, May 18, 2014

UAAC-AAUC Conference 2014 Congrès - October 28, 2014

Toronto

Universities Art Association of Canada/l’association d’art des universités du Canada

Panelists

Professor Catherine Richards, Visual Arts, University Research Chair , University of Ottawa.
Dr. Maria Lantin, Director of Research , Emily Carr University of Art + Design. 
Dr. Maureen Matthews, Curator of Ethnology, Manitoba Museum.

Session Chair

Dr. Caroline Langill, Associate Dean, Facilities, Policies and Planning in the Faculty of Art, OCAD

Presentation ABSTRACTS

Richards

There is a conversation within art practice that presumes artwork as an interactive entity and artists anticipate that their art works/objects will have lives of their own.  One could say this is a primary reason for making art.  Art schools are full of metaphorical talk which instantiates this kind of thinking.  This presentation describes objects that unexpectedly appeared to have their own intentions.  These artworks arose from a collaborative project with the research team at the Cardiac Transplant Program, Toronto General Hospital, and University Health Network. These works were created in the context of human heart transplants as both a living object 'the gift of life' and technological object. It was the successful patients ' gift' objects that began to appear to demonstrate an agency of their own, forcing a powerful reluctant encounter that was decidedly outside of the modernist framework whether it was artwork or the hospital itself. 

Lantin

I wonder about objects in virtual environments.  They don't age, they bear few life traces. We act upon them with the most functional of gestures.  Yet in the physical world there are some objects that we revere and that act as catalysts of patterned behaviour. We could say they are agents in a dance with the phenomenal world.  A dance that includes repetition, superstition, mimicry, creation, and destruction, memory and patterns.
 
I wonder how we design for the agency of objects.  How do we encode agency when its enactment is contingent on all the participating actors, and their context? How we do represent agency in virtual objects? How do we design objects to have more potential for agency? How do we detect movement towards an objects that signals an "agency" type of relationship? How do certain types of movements activate a space? Can we give subtle movements to virtual objects to signal an agency type of relationship? How would we expect such objects to move?
 
I propose a new way to think of virtual environments where we encode agency as an evolved, rehearsed, and enacted dance between objects, animals, and their environment. 

Matthews

Niningishkaa, Anishinaabe perspectives on person-like things.

In Art and Agency (1998), Alfred Gell developed an anthropological theory which skirted Western definitions of art and aesthetics, to explain the social role of objects which act like art in all cultures - including cultures without a concept of “art’.  Gell’s theory neatly parallels Anishinaabe concepts about animate and socially active objects, including very beautiful objects, but no category that approximates “art.” This paper takes a combined Anishinaabe and anthropological perspective to explore what Anishinaabe speakers can tell us about detecting and accounting for the role of animate objects (Hallowell 1960) and what an anthropological attentiveness to the personhood of objects (Strathern 2005, Latour 1993, Jackson 1989) can reveal.  It also considers recent scholarship on Actor Network (Latour 2013), Affect (O’Sullivan 2001) and Thing Theory (Brown 2001, Mitchell 2001, 2005) which, taken together, provide a theoretical and metaphorical triangulation of art and objects that make things happen.

Second, we are hosting a break-out session on Sunday October 26 10:30-12 to complement Saturday's UAAC panel "SHIVERING: Objects, Agency and Art." Here is a brief description/invitation...

Breakout session: Ideas of animacy, agency, materiality & the affective powers of art

Sunday 10:30 to 12:00 

Shared ideas about the relational aspects of art and art about relations with socially active objects.

Catherine's Talk

Exhibition - I'm Afraid to Ask - October 24 - November 7
Open Gallery, OCAD, Toronto

Human hearts are a living object 'gift of life' and a technological one. 
Successful transplanted patients give 'token objects' to the cardiologist who cannot part with them. 
Here the role of objects is dramatically manifested as they intervene in life processes, inter-relations and the limits of being human.