The Autopsies Group has a new website!

The Autopsies Site has relocated to http://www.autopsiesgroup.com or
http://autopsies.weebly.com

We'd be happy to have you join us there where there there is an Autopsies Blog and many other features coming soon.

You can also follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/autopsiesgroup
or sign up on the Autopsies Blog page of the above site.

Although the new site does not have a "members" (or abonnes) function the way blogspot does, you may show your support for our work by signing up here. We're hoping a 'follow' function will be possible soon on the new site and will be developing a Facebook page in the near future. We welcome feedback on the "contact us" page of the new website and comments on the Autopsies Blog page at that site.

We also hope you'll join us for speaking events which we'll be hosting in the course of the year.

The Autopsies Project

This project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media--the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example--the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought the phasing out of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to "modern life." What is the modern, then, without film projectors, typewriters, and turntables? How has the modern changed as trolley cars disappeared and hot air balloons were converted into high-risk sport rather than the demonstration of national pride in science and a crucial tactical mechanism of wartime? But what will our twenty-first century entail without mixmasters, VCRs, or petrol-driven automobiles? Does the "modern" in fact program the death of objects? What is the significance of death for things that live only through such a paradoxical program of planned obsolescence? How can cultural historians and theorists participate in the reflection on the ends of objects, from their physical finitude to the very projects for their disposal, the latter increasingly of concern with the multiplication of things that do not gently decompose into their own night.

This project attempts to think about modern life through reflections about social change, urban life, and the material things we associate with "modernity."

This project brings together a team of postgraduate students and full-time lecturers, from several humanities and social science disciplines, working in the year 2009-10 in a biweekly research seminar which is part of the Film Studies Space work on "Cinematic Memory, Consumer Culture, and Everyday Life."

Autopsies: The Afterlife of Dead Objects

This blog is Part of the UCL Film Studies Research Project, "Cinematic Memory, Consumer Culture, and Everyday Life"