Who’s looking at who?

<p>Object abuse: beyond tools, beyond brands, beyond auratic fetishism. A symposium event</p> <p>This event will consider a less-explored reading of objects and things, questioning our relation with them and exploring the potential of other forms of address. We suggest that a new intention needs to be employed to interrogate our role in relations with objects; that in object abuse there lies the question of who or what is abused. Does co-presence allow another position, redressing our intentions and interactions – who’s looking at who? Might the animistic gaze reveal objects to be more than tools or resources? Or are we blinded by our fetishes?*</p> <p> <ul><li> Three speakers, from different disciplines, will present a provocation in response to this question.</li> <li>An Open Space process will be engaged in for the assembled audience and speakers to address this question.</li> <li>People will participate in an active way, producing a dynamic debate.</li> <li>Participants will be co-present in a non-hierarchial structure.</li></ul></p> </p>*’They (the Moderns) do have a fetish, the strangest one of all: they deny to the objects they fabricate the autonomy they have given them. They pretend they are not surpassed, outstripped by events. They want to keep their mastery, and they find its source within the human subject, the origin of action’. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods </p>