What are your thoughts about these attempts to tell fictional stories via unusual online means:

1. Sumedicina: “Data fiction project. Story telling with information graphics.” (Via Listenerd.)

2. Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: “A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance.” (Actually, as the title indicates, a literary essay. Also via Listenerd.)

3. Dreaming Methods: “A fusion of writing and new media exploring imaginary memories and dream-inspired states.” (Via MetaFilter)

4. Love Begins A Picture: “Google Voice transcriptions formatted and annotated as poetry.” (Also not actually fiction, and maybe doesn’t belong here at all, but sort of interesting and also from that same Listenerd post that brought this up in the first place.)

Do you like any of these? Which ones? Why? Do you like the concept, or the story itself, or both?

I’m just curious.

Obsessive Consumption: What Did you Buy Today? (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), by Kate Bingaman-Burt, represents a selection of three years’ worth of the author’s annotated drawings of her purchases — including wedding bands, beer, a dog, and, of course, drawing supplies.

Full disclosure: Princeton Architectural Press also published my 2007 book, Taking Things Seriously. Fast Company’s William Bostwick recently quipped that I “wrote the book” on the significant objects meme; actually, I merely edited the book.

The drawing below, and lots more, is available at Bingaman-Burt’s etsy shop.

Starting with this.

Readers, we try to keep things interesting and surprising for you here at Significant Objects, not merely publishing great stories all the time, but throwing a curveball every now and again. We’ve done so by offering stories in comix form, by selling a Mystery Object, by holding a contest or two, by teaming up with Underwater New York to sell found objects, and so on.

Today we add to that list the debut of our first multi-part story: Four installments, four writers, four objects, over the next four days.

This is a challenging assignment, to say the least, but we’re pleased to announce that it’s been taken up and brilliantly met by the members of Kasper Hauser. The San Francisc0-based comedy troupe is well known for its books Obama’s Blackberry, Weddings of The Times, and The Skymaul Catalog. And they recently made an ad for Adult Swim! Check them out here for info on all of that and more.

The first installment of the four-part story will be published here later today; it’s by Rob Baedeker, who you will recall as the author of the brilliant Foppish Figurine story from v1. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we’ll publish installments by his KH colleagues: Dan Klein, James Reichmuth, and John Reichmuth.

We hope you enjoy!And readers, as always, please help us spread the word. Thanks!

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What?

Not enough stories about objects in your week?

Well then! Check out these entries in the Significant Objects Fictionaut Group, where the following talented writers have all created stories about the above object. Which one do you find to be most Significant? Chime in over on Fictionaut, or let us know here in the comments. We want your feedback! After all, our earlier Fictionaut-made story, by Nicholas Rombes, ultimately fetched nearly $150 — we’d love to see something like that happen again on behalf of Girls Write Now. Help us, readers!

(And either way, it’s pretty amazing to read a half-dozen responses to a single object — yet another affirmation of the story/object possibilities that helped inspire this project in the first place.)

Here are links to the six stories in our group, with the opening sentence of each:

• The Egg Whisk, by Sari Cunningham.”Two days after his bypass surgery she walked in on the nurse adjusting his catheter and dispensing dietary advice.”
• Where Is Love? by Lynn Chakoian.”I didn’t always have this metal thing poking out of the top of my head.”
• Summer Lawn, by Shelagh Power-Chopra. “That summer my mother moved to Maine and my father stayed put in the old house in Savannah.”
• Culinary, by Meg Pokrass. “He said most food was better when baked evenly.”
• How I Learned To Cook, by Susan Tepper. ” Ingredients: 1 cup long hair ….”
• Whiskers, by Paul de Dunas. “He worked on in the early first light, chopping with a crooked axe at the knotted stump of oak that stubbornly grasped the ground.”

And yes, for those of you playing close attention, that is the same Shelagh Power-Chopra who wrote the Painted Lady Figure story for v2! Thanks for asking!

As always, if you want to join Fictionaut, and/or our group there, let us know, we have connections.

A glimpse inside Significant Objects' laboratory.

Years ago, when I was (briefly) a grad student in Sociology, at Boston University, I discovered that positivist science doesn’t offer satisfactory models for synthesizing a cluster of elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, generative first principle, or essential core. Significant Objects now faces this problem. Our efforts to organize our experiment’s data into a simple pattern haven’t worked — doubtlessly because our model is too reductive. Perhaps we should consider the Hausdorff dimension; or maybe a parabolic partial differential equation is called for? Hmmm…

What am I going on about? Our project’s hypothesis, that narrative is a key x-factor influencing an object’s exchange value, i.e., by transforming a qualitatively and quantitatively “insignificant” object into a “significant” one, was definitively proven by the pioneering quasi-anthropological experiment that Rob Walker and I ran from July to November 2009. As a result of our experiment, which involved using 100 stories by talented authors as item descriptions for 100 objects that we listed on eBay, the “value in trade” of those objects increased from a mere $128.74 to an astonishing $3,612.51.

Yes, MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program scouts, you heard right: We employed narrative to boost the qualitative-quantitative significance of castoff objects by over 2,700%. But that was just the beginning of the important work we’re now doing behind the scenes here at Significant Objects.

From October through December 2009, we shared our experiment’s results here at the Significant Objects website, via a plethora of incontrovertible charts and graphs:

• We classified the 100 objects in our experiment as talismans, totems, evidence, and fossils.
• We presented the raw original price/final price data.
• We listed the week in which each story was published, and its associated object listed for auction on eBay.
• We neutralized the Duration Factor by adding $18.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 1, $17.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 2, and so forth through Week 18 of 19. The resulting Adjusted Final Prices have been used in our figuring ever since.
• We presented the experiment’s overall, week-to-week mean and median price data.
• We compared the Final Prices and Adjusted Final Prices, and made it possible to rank sales data by either factor.
• We presented the experiment’s Top 25 most significant objects (according to adjusted sales rank) in a visual manner, and invited readers to point out aesthetic considerations that might explain the objects’ popularity (i.e., independent of the associated narratives).
• We also invited readers to point out aesthetic considerations that might explain the unpopularity of some objects.

The above tables and charts demonstrate, in granular detail, exactly what narrative does. But how does narrative accomplish this miraculous transformation, this transubstantiation of insignificant into significant object? Since December of last year, our crack team of analysts — working in Savannah and Boston — has struggled to pin down a clear cause-and-effect relation that might explain how this process works. So far, no such relation has been discovered.

To paraphrase a scrap of doggerel from The Scarlet Pimpernel: “Is it in Heaven, or is it in Heck / That damned elusive cause-and-effect?”

Not that our research has been in vain. If the insignificant-to-significant objectual transubstantiation were a simple, straightforward matter, then it would already have been discovered — no doubt by fully funded marketers and brand consultants — years ago. We now strongly suspect that the relation between the cluster of elements in our data set cannot be reduced to anything so simple as cause-and-effect. Which is why we’ve jury-rigged a Verifiable Insignificant-to-Significant Transubstantiation Analyzer (model 1.0), pictured below.

The VISTA 1.0, multiple patents pending

The VISTA 1.0 has improved our analytical efficiencies tremendously. For example, in January and February 2010, we speedily constructed tables of data allowing us to do the following:

• We analyzed the effect of CATEGORY on the experiment’s 100 object/stories, ranked by adjusted final sales data. Result: inconclusive.
• We analyzed the effect of FUNCTION on the experiment’s 100 object/stories, ranked by adjusted final sales data. Result: inconclusive.
• We charted CATEGORY and FUNCTION on pie charts. (OK, we didn’t use the VISTA 1.0 for that.)
• Before leaving the question of FUNCTION behind, we asked readers to vote on whether particular objects were a novelty, or houseware.
• We analyzed the effect of EXPOSITION STRATEGY on the experiment’s 100 object/stories, ranked by adjusted final sales data. Result: inconclusive.
• We started analyzing the effect of HOT and COOL narrative modes on the experiment’s 100 object/stories, ranked by adjusted final sales data, and (what’s more) correlated with CATEGORY. Result: not in yet.

While doing all of the above analysis work, from December 2009 through February 2010, we managed to publish a second volume of Significant Objects. Kathryn Davis, Tom McCarthy, Amy Fusselman, Neil LaBute, Gary Panter, and 45 other writers helped us raise over $2000 for the tutoring program 826 National. Phew!

But then… disaster struck! The VISTA 1.0 threw a rod, just as we were launching the current volume of Significant Objects — our third — in order to raise money for the tutoring program Girls Write Now. Not to worry: SO v3 will continue to publish terrific new stories every weekday, through April. But our analysis efforts have ground to a halt. This is tragic, because correlating HOT/COOL styles with CATEGORY looked like a very promising direction: four of the Top Ten objects/stories are Cool Talismans, for example; and another four are Hot Fossils. Meanwhile, Hot Talismans and Cool Fossils don’t rank nearly as high. Why?

Which brings us back to the problem that I encountered as a Sociology grad student. The VISTA 1.0 wasn’t up to the ticklish task of synthesizing a cluster of elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, generative first principle, or essential core. So — before we can even begin to develop the VISTA 2.0, which we’ll program to be non-reductionist, if possible, Rob and I need to decide what shape the answer to our experiment’s question might likely take. I can’t speak for Rob, but I tend to agree with Benjamin and Adorno that a “constellation” — i.e., a pattern, half-discovered and half-invented, drawn among points that may or may not be arranged randomly — is the only appropriate model for a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of elements.

This is where you come in!

While we continue to tinker with the VISTA, we’re crowdsourcing the analysis. We’re not asking you to pin down cause-and-effect — because not only did we fail to do so, but we no longer think it’s possible. Instead, we’d like you take a gander at the table below. You’ll find elements galore, a Milky Way of datum points: FUNCTION, EXPOSITION TYPE, HOT/COOL, CATEGORY. But don’t tense up; instead, relax. Imagine that you’re stargazing, on a clear night in the mountains, and that you feel like discovering/inventing a few of your own constellations.

Look at the data in the table below, in a relaxed and playful yet focused, logical way. Can you connect the dots? That is, can you spot meaningful patterns — “meaningful” in the sense that others can see them, too? If so, DON’T REVEAL YOUR ANSWER YET! We’ll be announcing a Spot-the-Pattern Challenge soon. There will be prizes. Go ahead and study the data, and stay tuned.

A significant objet d'art

We’ve mentioned a few other art projects that use eBay as a platform or medium. The idea-based artist Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a fun one. It’s a significant object — a sculpture, supposedly, though it looks pretty much like a black box with wires running into it — that forever attempts to auction itself on eBay.

From Larsen’s website: “Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.”

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter is listed on eBay this week with a starting price of $6,858.00.

Going once, going twice...

These just came in today — and they’re too amazing to keep to ourselves! Above: Toy Airplane + Robert Lopez Story; below, Mermaid Figurine + Tom McCarthy Story. And check out the amazing story-in-a-found-bottle presentation, courtesy of Underwater New York. Fantastic!

As it happens, both of these Significant Objects were purchased by Susan Clements, who shared these images with us. Thank you, Susan!

More Significant Objects in their new homes can be found here. Are you an S.O. owner? Please send us your pix!

Questions? Comments? Let us know.

Rank	Volume	Object	Author	Market price	S.O. Price
1	v2	Globe Paperweight	Debbie Millman	$1.49	$197.50
2	v1	Russian figure	Doug Dorst	$3.00	$193.50
3	v2	Kangamouse	Chris Adrian	$0.00	$162.50
4	v1	Indian Figurine	R.K. Scher	$0.99	$157.50
5	v2	Music Box	Nicholas Rombes	$0.50	$147.50
6	v2	Rabbit Candle	Neil LaBute	$3.00	$112.50
7	v1	Wood animal	Meg Cabot	$0.75	$108.50
8	v1	Pink Horse	Kate Bernheimer	$1.00	$104.50
9	v2	Mystery Object	Ben Greenman	$0.99	$103.50
10	v1	HAWK ashtray	William Gibson	$2.99	$101.00
11	v1	“4” Tile	Toni Schlesinger	$1.00	$88.00
12	v1	Brass Boot	Bruce Sterling	$3.00	$86.00
13	v2	Just Married Cup	Barbara Bogaev	$0.75	$81.00
14	v1	Porcelain shoe	Sheila Heti	$4.00	$77.51
15	v1	Fake Banana	Josh Kramer	$0.25	$76.00
16	v1	Missouri Shot glass	Jonathan Lethem	$1.00	$76.00
17	v1	Measuring spoons	Mark Doty	$2.99	$76.00
18	v1	Mallet	Colson Whitehead	$0.33	$71.00
19	v1	Duck Tray	Stewart O’Nan	$3.00	$71.00
20	v2	Partial Mermaid	Tom McCarthy	$0.00	$68.00
21	v2	Aquarium Souvenir	Mark Jude Poirier	$1.00	$66.07
22	v2	Pan Flute	Deb Olin Unferth	$0.00	$63.50
23	v1	Felt Mouse	Megan O’Rourke	$0.50	$62.00
24	v1	Cow Vase	Ed Park	$2.00	$62.00
25	v2	Letters and Numbers Plate	Joe Lyons	$2.49	$61.00

Note: Don’t forget that, among other possible factors, charity effects may have helped v2 prices; in any case, our number-crunching remains focused mostly on v1, when that potential spending rationale was not yet present.