Robin Mackay

Armen Avanessian

An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy. Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. #Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike. On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own “Prometheanism,” and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of “reasonable” contemporary political alternatives.

The Accelerationist Reader

#Accelerate

Amanda Beech

James Wiltgen

Perspectives from philosophy, aesthetics, and art on how to envisage the construction site of possible worlds. Given the highly coercive and heavily surveilled dynamics of the present moment, when the tremendous pressures exerted by capital on contemporary life produces an aggressively normative “official reality,” the question of the construction of other possible worlds is crucial and perhaps more urgent than ever. This collection brings together different perspectives from the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, and art to discuss the mechanisms through which possible worlds are thought, constructed, and instantiated, forcefully seeking to overcome the contemporary moment's deficit of conceptualizing alternate realities—its apparent fear of imagining possible new and compelling futures—to begin the arduous task of producing the political dynamics necessary for actual construction. Implicit in this dynamic between the imaginary and the possible is the question of how thinking intertwines with both rationality and the inherited contingencies and structures of the world. With no ascertainable ground on which to build, with no confidence in any given that could guarantee our labors, how do we even envisage the construction site(s) of possible worlds, and with what kind of diagrams, tools, and languages can we bring them into being?

Construction Site for Possible Worlds

Luke Pendrell

James Trafford

An examination of the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the planetary media network and of the aesthetic as an enabler of new modes of knowledge. This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art's relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art, and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions.

Speculative Aesthetics

Mark Alizart

Cryptocommunism

Philosophical Research and Development

Collapse

Reza Negarestani

Keith Tilford

A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought. Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another. Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility. A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought. This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.

Chronosis

A geophilosophical odyssey through the remains of Cornwall's industrial past offers a historical portrait of geotrauma in action. This unique document provides a pioneering case study in post-“site-specific” geophilosophy. Based on a weird field trip into Cornwall's mining heartlands with geologists, philosophers, and ecologists as guides, Hydroplutonic Kernow drills down through nature, industry, and cultural capital to site the local within the global, unfolding the telluric plots that manipulated populations and devastated the landscape during the industrial age. In doing so, it provides a historical portrait of geotrauma in action. This geophilosophical odyssey takes us through the remains of the region's industrial past, reading them through the twisted prism of the geocosmic theory of trauma espoused by legendary “cryptographer” Dr. Daniel Barker and further developed by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani, and uncovering the deep plot of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, the collusion between water and the depths of the earth. Along with full documentation of the trip, the book also contains exegetical materials including an essay by Reza Negarestani, a poem by Jake Chapman, a preface by Caitlin DeSilvey, and an in-depth interview with Mining Engineer Steve Tarrant.

Hydroplutonic Kernow

An investigation of the nature and philosophical uses of number. The first volume of Collapse investigates the nature and philosophical uses of number. The volume includes an interview with Alain Badiou on the relation between philosophy, mathematics, and science, an in-depth interview with mathematician Matthew Watkins on the strange connections between physics and the distribution of prime numbers, and contributions that demonstrate the many ways in which number intersects with philosophical thought—from the mathematics of intensity to terrorism, from occultism to information theory, and graphical works of multiplicity.

Numerical Materialism

Collapse, Volume 1

An assembly of perspectives on risk, contingency, and chance—at the gaming table, in the markets, and in life. A transdisciplinary survey of practices that produce, analyse, and exploit risk and uncertainty, the eighth volume of Collapse uncovers the conceptual underpinnings of methods designed to extract value from contingency—at the gaming table, in the markets, and in life. The indictment of “casino capitalism” and the centrality of risk to contemporary society are traced back to a ubiquitous image of thought that originated in games of chance, but which is no longer adequate to address a world whose realities are now shaped by risk models and trading in speculative futures. To challenge the “casino” model, this volume brings together philosophers who extend the thinking of contingency beyond statistical modelling, professional traders and gamblers whose lifelong experience has shaped their understanding of chance, researchers analysing the perception and treatment of risk and uncertainty in diverse arenas including derivatives trading, quantum physics, insurance, sonic experimentation, literature, futurology, mathematics, and machine gambling, and artists whose work addresses both the desire to confront chance and the need to tame it by bringing it to order.

Casino Real

Collapse, Volume 8

The notion of 'contingency' has become crucial both in contemporary philosophy, and, as the artists in this volume suggest, in art today. Transcriptions of lectures by Reza Negarestani, Elie Ayache and Matthew Poole discuss the need for artists to abandon notions of autonomy and knowledge the greater networks to which they belong. This publication also includes a group discussion with the exhibition organizer, gallerist Miguel Abreu, and artists Scott Lyall and Sam Lewitt, that explores how a contemporary reading of the notion of 'contingency' is relevant to contemporary artists.

The Medium of Contingency

An artist and a mathematician debate, find common ground, and jointly create an assemblage that is neither (or both) an artwork and a mathematical model. A week-long residency project brought together artist Conrad Shawcross and mathematician Matthew Watkins to reflect on the ways in which artists use (or misuse) scientific and mathematical concepts. Secrets of Creation documents this fascinating meeting of worlds, presenting both the week's discussions and debates, and the project upon which Shawcross and Watkins subsequently embarked. Navigating a route that tacked between formalism and natural language, experts and laymen, quantity and quality, poetics and mechanics, Shawcross and Watkins gradually forged a shared discourse in which the concerns of the artist and those of the mathematician could find a common ground. The project ended with their joint creation of an assemblage that was neither (or both) an artwork and a mathematical model.

Secrets of Creation

This collection charts some of the ways in which site continues to be a concern for contemporary practice, and introduces the concept of "plot" as an alternative. The critical concept of site-specificity once seemed to harbour the potential for disruption. But site-specific work has become increasingly assimilated into the capitalist logic of regeneration and value creation. The materialist critique of the art object has been shortcircuited by the franchised idiosyncrasies of international nomad flâneurs. And on a planet whose entire surface is mapped and apped, the concept of "site" itself becomes ever more problematic. How can we do justice to the particularity of local sites while unearthing their material conditions? What do a contemporary "geo-philosophy" and the historical legacy of site-specific art have to offer each other? Can we develop methods for the controlled unpacking of the local into the global, avoiding trivial reconciliations between local sites and their global conditions? When Site Lost the Plot charts some of the ways in which site continues to be a concern for contemporary practice; and introduces the concept of "plot" as an alternative approach. Alongside artists discussing their practice and their approach to site and plot, contributors from various disciplines introduce concepts from cartography, mathematics, film, fiction, design, and philosophy.

Robin Mackay

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