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THE MATERIAL EXPERIENCE: EVERYDAY OBJECTS AS SYMBOLS AND CULTURAL MEDIATORS
Abstract
This study focuses on objects as companions on the experiences of everyday life, connecting the emotional worlds to the mental space of individuals, through their functions and symbolisms, characterizing them as true predicates of culture. Examining their biographies means highlighting them before ignored cultural facets. Artifacts are not inert or passive objects, but interactive agents in sociocultural life and cognition. The signification of the artifact resides in both the object as a self-enclosed material fact and in its performative 'gestural' patterns of behavior in relation to design, space, time and society. The objects are our connection with the world. They are a hallmark on the path of our cultural evolution. Simple artifacts help the storytelling of lives, but their uniqueness of design or style are factors that can turn mere commodities or everyday objects into sign systems that carry highly evocative ideas and meanings.
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Objectification makes a conceptual scheme to become effective, transforming what was abstract in concrete elements. It is the process that gives materiality to ideas, making them objective, concrete and tangible (Author's note).
The object has an autonomous existence due to its material dimension, but cannot charge a life of meanings, derived from the different relations with different events (Author's note).
Roland Barthes explains that "the function of an object is always at least the sign itself of this function: there are no objects in our society without some kind of add-function" (Barthes, 2001, p. 210).
SUDJIC, Deyan. The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. pp. 7-49.
Pre-existent objects appear more aged by the appearance of objects more technically advanced, with superior operational quality (Author's note).
Gilles Simondon in SANTOS, Milton. A natureza do espaço. São Paulo, EDUSP, 2008.
Baudrillard (2002, p. 10) stated that there would be almost so many criteria for classification as objects: according to functionality, size, shape, material, durability, etc.
The form and content only exist separately as "partial truths", like abstractions that only rediscover their value when taken together. (Ledrut apud Santos, 2008, p. 100).
The trend and the fact are two sides (one abstract and one concrete) of the same phenomenon of evolutionary determinism (Leroi-Gourhan, 1984, p. 25).
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