thingsstories

Thingsstories is a narrative concept and form in which objects, artifacts, or environments serve as the primary carriers of story and meaning, often told from nonhuman perspectives or through documentary-like devices.

The term emerged in contemporary literary and media studies to describe works that foreground materiality and the agency of things, spanning microfiction, catalogues, installations, and interactive media.

Typical techniques include personification of objects, object diaries, provenance stamps, and cross-media presentation that blends text, image, and sound, sometimes in participatory or augmented reality formats.

Themes center on memory, loss, and how material culture shapes identity, as well as questions of authorship, object agency, and the limits of human-centered storytelling.

In practice, thingsstories appear in literary anthologies, museum and gallery contexts, and digital projects, where an everyday item becomes a portal to histories and social relations.

Critics note the approach invites new ways of seeing, while arguing it risks sentimentality or fragmentation if not carefully curated; it intersects with thing theory and posthumanist thought.

See also: thing theory, object-oriented ontology, material narrative.