Morning

Opening Performance Extract

The Table – Blind Summit

Blind Summit’s award winning puppet show stars a table-top puppet who deconstructs his own puppetry. He introduces us to his puppeteers, orders them around, cajoles them, tells them off and frequently makes them laugh. They operate him but, paradoxically, he is in charge. The show asks: what moves us? Thoughts? Emotions? Gravity? Or three invisible people holding our heads and limbs?

Talks and discussions

From Mind to Body and Back Again – Patrick Haggard

Philosophical thought experiments invite us to imagine what life would be like if we were just brains in a vat, and if all our interface to the outside world came from chemical and electrical signals trafficked into and out of the brain. This may seem like science fiction, but in a way our own bodies are the vats that hold our transmitting and receiving brains: perhaps we are all mental puppet masters of our bodies. This talk will explain some of the neural processes involved in in controlling and in perceiving the movements of our own bodies, as well as exploring whether the puppet is a real extension of the puppeteer.

A Thinking Puppet – Melissa Trimingham

We all have a false but convincing sense of our minds as essentially detached from our bodies and from the material world. In fact it is the material world and our ‘play’ with it that from our earliest moments brings meaning into being for us, minute by minute, hour by hour. Watching the relationship of puppet and puppeteer, especially if we laugh or cry, exposes and intensifies the unnoticed way that in day-to-day life we often ‘think’ through objects, the body and the surrounding world, rather than through language. Such an exposure makes puppetry intensely enjoyable and powerful, a return to a long-forgotten state of creative play, where anything is possible...

Satellite performances over lunch

With Sean Myatt, Ollie Evans and Kristin Fredricksson.

Afternoon

One Thing at a Time – Ken Arnold 

We tend to think of objects in museums as coming in groups. Juxtaposition – putting things together for contrasting effect – is one of the commonest words in any curator’s vocabulary. But in my talk, I want to think instead about the power of dealing with individual objects. I will talk about the poetic isolating approach to Henry Wellcome’s objects used in The Phantom Museum, about the ‘First Time Out’ project, where five individual objects were toured around five different institutions to become 25 exhibits, and finally about ‘The Thing Is’ – a live event series in which audiences are introduced to individual objects by passionate advocates in lively show-and-tell sessions.

Reading the Minds of Objects and Others – Francesca Happé

Why do we sometimes treat objects like people, and treat things as if they have attitudes and intentions? Children typically develop an early and pervasive ability to ‘mentalise’; preschoolers play jokes, tell lies and keep secrets in ways that reveal their ability to read others’ minds. These abilities become most apparent when contrasted with the social and communication difficulties that define autism, a condition characterised by ‘mind-blindness’. I will discuss research exploring when and how people attribute inner states, what leads us to treat something as an ‘agent’, and the benefits and costs of our intuitive and automatic ‘mind-reading’.

Feeling Things – Steven Connor

We are mistrustful of our attachment to material things, accusing ourselves of idolatry or fetishism. But human beings are characterised by our uniquely rich awareness of and responsiveness to objects. I will consider some of the emotions that objects help us to feel, or even teach us to feel – such as disgust, curiosity and tenderness. We presume that love should have nothing to do with objectification – but what if a deep relation to objects were indispensable to knowing how to love?

Reflecting on the day

With Vincent Walsh and Penny Francis.