Entire Symposium

Jay Telotte and Ian Bogost
Welcome (7 minutes, 7MB MP3)

Graham Harman
American Objects vs. Austrian Objects (1 hour 42 minutes, 93MB MP3)

Steven Shaviro
The Universe of Things (1 hour 20 minutes, 74MB MP3)

Levi Bryant
Being is Flat: The Strange Mereology
of Object-Oriented Ontology (1 hour 7 minutes, 61MB MP3)

Ian Bogost
Cakes, Chips, and Calculus (1 hour 11 minutes, 65MB MP3)

Barbara Stafford
Concluding Remarks (22 minutes, 21MB MP3)

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology ("OOO" for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

Bringing some of its foundational figures together for the first time, this inaugural Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium marked an effort to brew a new flavor of post-continental philosophy for the twenty-first century.

For more information see: http://ooo.gatech.edu/