Museum of vestigial objects

Primeval man looked at his empty hand, devoid of ‘objects’. The ‘vestigialness’ of his hand led him to grab an ‘OBJECT’.

Thus materiel desire is born.

What the author is pointing out here is material desire is born out of the ‘functionlessness’ of an empty hand. Another important aspect one needs to consider in this theoretical oeuvre is ‘anxiety’. Between the ‘vestigialness’ of human hand and the ‘OBJECT’ lies a vast sea of anxiety.

What if Primeval man was not anxious of his empty hand? Instead of finding an ‘object’, what if he found purpose of emptiness in his own hand? We might have been living in a very different world now. A world which doesn’t replace its anxiety of ‘vestigialness’ by OBJECTS.

While the Primeval man picked up the object, he also let it go in order to pick up another. A series of objects are been picked and left only to be realised that objects are temporary, emptiness permanent.

A historic blunder, an unforgivable catastrophe has dawned upon man by the simple act of picking up an ‘object’ to supress anxiety.

Let’s consider the unlikely event, instead of picking up the object, the primeval man contempleted his ‘empty’ hand?

To understand empty, one has to understand occupied. A chair is empty, because it is ‘not occupied’. So, empty = not occupied & vice versa? Are we saying that ‘empty’ & ‘occupied’ cannot exist in the same dimension?

Maybe a chair is not a very good example. Let’s try again. So, by the act of ‘being’, we occupy and whether we move or not, we will always ‘be’, so nothing is actually ‘empty’.

an elephant moves ahead, leaving behind the elephant shaped emptiness.

Is the primeval man destined to pick up the objects? Maybe yes. Doesn’t that cast a long dark shadow about our existence?

Over the course of thousands of years, man has grabbed so many objects. If we start in the antiquity, man picked up a weapon to hunt. He picked up a tool to build a shelter, a tool to farm, feed himself and his family.

From being a hunter gatherer we have reached today 2020. Readers please be informed we don’t want to cut past thousands of years of human history for the sake of convenience. Our advanced researchers after years of historical and anthropological studies have found that the ‘act of grabbing’ has never been challenged as of today in the entire history of human civilization.

More and more of our experimental subjects have reconfirmed that they are no longer associated with the ‘act of grabbing’. The ‘vestigialness’ of hand no longer leads to grabbing an ‘OBJECT’. Instead it leads to the ‘push of a button’. As in the subject is no longer associated with the object directly. The entire purpose of the human hand stands challenged.

‘OBJECT’ is turned into an object.

‘act of grabbing’ = ‘push of a button’ ?

An ‘OBJECT’ turning into an object is again a tremendous development in the history of mankind. The anthropological co-relationship between the intrinsic desire of human hands to grab up an object and the object itself is broken.

No longer we are responsible for grabbing an object, we are liberated from our ‘anxieties’. Liberation from anxiety and a free market is the perfect recipe for disaster. We started grabbing objects which are no longer physically present, but rather a photographic impression of the same. Basically we grabbed ‘nothingness’ with the hope and image of the real object. This disconnect is manifested into our lives.

The disconnect is wide, leading to another form of anxiety. ‘Anxiety of surplus’. ‘Anxiety of surplus’?

What will we do with the anxiety of surplus? We make space in our hands. We make space from all the surplus we have collected.

How do we do it? By giving it away, to get more surplus.

The department of vestigial objects have documented numerous objects which are at some point held by human hands and now lying on the world wide web as vestigial objects. Objects which are no longer needed and one must put them away to hold newer objects and so on.

We are thankful to numerous people who have participated in our surveys and generously let us use the photographs of their vestigial objects. In the following pages, you will encounter regular daily objects which can come to your hand by click of a button. You can look into the virtual object, observe, study it and get it closer to your hands.