As technology continues to disrupt so many social and economic formations, our relationship to every object we encounter is transformed. Things now present a new register of unstable meanings. Why we want something, what it means to us, how its value is established—all these questions have become politically and phenomenologically charged. These, and a few other concerns, motivate The Unstable Object, a long-term observational film project. What are the working spaces like for those that make the things around us? What does the object mean to them? How do these objects connect us? What kinds of exchanges take place through the object itself—now the locus and repository of all kinds of new symptoms and meanings? Through a series of half-hour observational film portraits of individual factories, The Unstable Object makes visible what the new economy has, by consequence and distance, hidden: the layered complexity of "things" at the moment and site of production.

Daniel Eisenberg has been making films and videos at the border between documentary and experimental media for over thirty years. He has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; the Musée du Cinema, Brussels; De Unie, Rotterdam; and Kino Arsenal, Berlin; among others. His films have screened throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including the Berlin Film Festival; the Sydney Film Festival; the London Film Festival; the Jerusalem Film Festival; FIDMarseille; and the Whitney Biennial. Eisenberg’s awards include the Berlin Prize, from the American Academy in Berlin; a Guggenheim Fellowship; the D.A.A.D. Berliner Künstlerprogramm Fellowship; an Illinois Arts Council Media Arts Fellowship; a Creative Capital Grant; and an NEA Fellowship. Other prizes include those from the Prix Georges De Beauregard International at FIDMarseille; the arc+film Festival, Graz; the Ann Arbor Film Festival; the Black Maria Film and Video Festival; and the New England Film Festival. The Unstable Object, Eisenberg's ongoing series of films and installations of factories across the world, has been seen in installation at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Istanbul Design Biennial, 2016.