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Short abstract:

This paper develops a material-semiotics of nonsense as scientific tool, thinking with three “nonsense arrays” as found/founded art-science (Efstathiou 2019). Two are designed for laboratory cognition research, and one is r/whatisthisthing, a forum for submitting and identifying strange objects.

Long abstract:

This story starts with two arrays of nonsense stimuli designed to probe how human brains process meaning. The Novel Objects and Unusual Names (NOUN) database (2016) is part of a lineage of “novel” or “pseudo” stimuli used in research settings in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and psychiatry. The NOUN database was designed to replace Snodgrass and Vanderwart’s 260 pictures (1980), a set of weird digitized line drawings designed to modulate familiarity and novelty. The NOUN database, in contrast, is a collection of actual objects which were deemed by its collectors as novel, non-meaningful, or difficult to identify. (Some of the objects the author of this abstract recognized from NOUN were children’s/pet toys and single function kitchen tools.)

Instead of looking (first, mainly) to the brain by abstracting people and objects from their contexts, I look to the materials and practices of abstraction for clues about what we call thinking. First, I read these nonsense arrays as “found/founded science” (Efstathiou 2019) - also a way of reading across traditions of ‘found objects’ in contemporary art. Next, I turn to an alternate collection of found objects brought to the subreddit r/whatisthisthing. By examining the objects brought to the forum and how members answer “what is this thing?”, I demonstrate that each of these “nonsense arrays” operate as an index of alienation. I contend that beginning in the wild, (in our own wilds) - can be an integral counterweight for modalities of research that may risk mistaking abstraction for universality and alienation for novelty.