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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.