This work-in-progress presentation explores the technicity of images and artefacts by approaching objects as encapsulated relations, or material condensations that actualise and transform the relational fields in their vicinity. “Technicity” is defined here as a regime of relations between humans and their worlds, actualised through technical activities. Rather than beginning with functions, roles, or uses, the focus is placed on how the technical and cognitive functioning of objects—their material and perceptual configurations—generate and transform relations in their surroundings.
Building on earlier work on decorated yams in Papua New Guinea as “relations-made-things,” this analytical lens is extended to tools, instruments, machines, and images. This perspective enables an understanding of artefacts as operators and agents of collective representations and cosmological imaginaries in a post-Gellian framework. Through their modes of functioning, objects contribute to the emergence of particular logics of engagement with the world: they orient bodies, gestures, and attention; structure perception; stabilise or unsettle categories; and materialise specific ways of imagining relations between persons, materials, and environments.
Drawing on research on Abelam decorated yams and ritual objects, the discussion moves to networked printers and, more tentatively, generative “AI,” to examine how objects participate in world-making processes. In doing so, it highlights how their functioning encapsulates and reconfigures the relational, perceptual, and cosmological orders in which they are embedded.