Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

these possessions and their relationships with them
to change.
The FIX project positioned object failure as an
excuse, an alibi, by which objects could break from
their established roles and be remade or re-contextualised
as something else. In this regard, failure
releases objects and their owners from a contract
of use. ‘Freed from their reason to exist’ (Brandes,
Stich, & Wender, 2009, p. 131), these objects offer
themselves as an opportunity. Failure is not limited
to material faults or reducible to a logic internal to
the object. Objects fail when they cease to satisfy a specific need and
therefore failure is defined not by the object alone but by a particular
subject-object relationship (or, more precisely, by a set of relations
from which a subject and an object may be construed). This subjective
aspect of failure was evident in the FIX project with numerous objects
described by participants as ‘aesthetically faulty’. These objects, although
functional in a mechanistic sense, had fallen out of use due to a
perceived inappropriateness or ugliness.
As an initial enquiry into the remaking of objects, the public nature of
the FIX project offered a number of benefits over a more isolated approach.
Of primary concern was that the selection of objects for modification
be removed from my control; having members of the public
bring in their ‘problems’ introduced a degree of randomness into the
selection process, forcing the research in todirections that may not
have been explored if object selection had been left to my own discretion.
As a result of this relinquishing of control, the research was also
exposed to a variety of social relations, given both through the socially
constituted nature of the object and the specific object-owner dynamic,
which would otherwise have been absent from the investigation. The
randomisation of object selection provided a random selection of
social domains (albeit social domains given within a largely white,
middle class, western, contemporary-art-going public3 ). A third aspect
of this public approach, and one that was to become a dominant theme
within the research, was the engagement with audience – the public
nature of the project made the research an explicitly performative act.
Within the context of FIX this performance was deployed in order to
[Figure 3-3]
FIX submission form, 2004.
Image is author’s own.
Remaking Things
3/ Within this narrow demographic di-
versity was present in sexual identity
and age.
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