• 1988 Kitchener: “Ontology is the theory of the nature of existence, and ontography is its description”. A “descriptive element to its grand-theoretical counterpart”. Perhaps “the casual relation between humans are their earth”? No
• An “interest in diversity and specificity”
• A universal thing, like IKEA instructions
• Latour (the litany guy): “If you are mixed up with trees, how do you know they are not using you to achieve their dark designs?” (How wonderful!)
o The point: remove the binary of nature and culture
• Bogost’s ontography: “the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description” – a “compendium”, “things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation*”
o *related to frequency and what that repetition might therefore mean
o So we are finding the meanings through relationships, and finding relationships by simply stating what things are and do?
o Isn’t this statement somewhat contradictory? Or is it as simple as ‘here are the things, figure it out for yourself’?
• Avoid the “abstraction of example without exemplification*”
o *showing or illustrating by example
• Incompatibility! It still tells us a lot, maybe more than the smooth compatibility and shoehorned logic of prose
o To remind us: no matter how smooth a system flows, it is always made up of alien elements
• “The prison of representation” – let a thing just be a thing
• Lists as a filter for the world that respects the autonomy of its listlings – cataloging
• Now this – what’s the difference between an ontography and a typology?
o I suppose ontographies can be broader but even so… they also need constraints, even just arbitrary ones, to work… just like a typology
• Memento mori
• Must it be words? Oh, no
• Use ontography to consider how something will work in a context, eg: an architect creates an ontography of a space they want to build and realises that the sun (a facet) will be blocked by the potential building (another facet) and leave the neighbours (yet another facet) in perpetual shade
• Brainstorming – dump it all on the paper, see what you can learn from the juxtaposition of the words. Chop them up, scatter them, see where they fall
• Photography as a tool for capturing objects in the wild, much like a national geographic photographer snaps a watering hole
• Various forms of ontography – drawing things together and finding relationships, or exploding a cohesive scene into universes of alien objects
• What does meanwhile mean in this context? What power does it hold? I don’t understand
• Cataloging can show the way things exist but also the way in which they operate, and how that can change in context
• “An ontograph is a crowd… a landfill”