Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

This paper examines how artistic practice can function as a site of philosophical inquiry by staging a sustained encounter between Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the ethics of death. Centring on Still Warm, a cabinet of curiosities composed of found animal remains encountered during the long-term project The 8 Museum, the paper explores how flat ontology is destabilised when once-living bodies enter curatorial space. While OOO insists on the ontological equality of all objects, Still Warm reveals a persistent experiential resistance to this claim: viewers may intellectually assent to flatness, yet remain unable to feel that all objects carry equal ethical and emotional weight.

Through a practice-led methodology grounded in non-extractive collection and digital preservation, the project transforms the cabinet of curiosities into an experimental apparatus for testing ontology under affective pressure. The paper introduces two key concepts—ontological discomfort and affective gravity—to describe the tension that emerges when metaphysical flatness encounters the lived realities of care, mortality, and responsibility. Ontological discomfort names the bodily and ethical unease that arises when philosophical coherence fails to account for affective experience, while affective gravity describes the uneven pull exerted by certain objects, particularly those marked by death, within ostensibly flat systems.

Rather than refuting Object-Oriented Ontology, the paper proposes a post-OOO orientation that recognises the limits of flatness in curatorial and ethical contexts. By positioning Still Warm not as an illustration of theory but as a site where theory encounters its own boundaries, the paper argues for an expanded understanding of ontology that makes space for affect, care, and the unavoidable hierarchies of human attention. In doing so, it advances a model of artistic research in which discomfort becomes a method and curatorial practice becomes a form of philosophical experimentation.