Objects of the Encounter

The formation of the modernist framework has been heavily influenced by divisive definitions such as culture and nature, male and female, mind and body, reason and sense, and so forth—causing a profound alienation between subjects, human and nonhuman. As we witness the collapse of modernist ideology, fostering imaginative thinking, establishing intersubjective relations and envisioning collaborative survival becomes increasingly important. To achieve this, this project proposes a methodological framework for critical design practice that enables the reexamination of predominant human subjectivity itself. By revealing gaps in the modernist worldview, we can move towards a more dissident way of being in the world, embracing vulnerability and learning to remain with trouble, discomfort and risk.

The artistic research consists of a three-layered framework emphasising openness and communal participation. The first level is theoretical on which environmental issues are critically informed by post-humanist, feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives. On the second level, by following humble (non)human agents, research materialises through participatory fieldwork and archival studies. On the third level, design intervention creates deviant objects as glitches that act as mediums to sense affective emotions of the encounter between different subjects as well as objects that preserve the deep time. By thinking with uncertainty, yet without being paralysed, the project fosters a recasting of human subjectivity, aesthetics and ethics. Additionally, it offers a linguistic dimension with which to re-articulate the current time of precarity through a different lens.