Hydroplutonic Kernow

Hydroplutonic Kernow PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029786
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
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

Hydroplutonic Kernow PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029786
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Get Book Here

Book Description
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

Hydroplutonic Kernow PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0957529546
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
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.

Secrets of Creation

Secrets of Creation PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0957529511
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
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.

Speculative Aesthetics

Speculative Aesthetics PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0993045855
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
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.

X-Risk

X-Risk PDF Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029840
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction. From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity's future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history. Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era. In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.

Speculative Aesthetics

Speculative Aesthetics PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0957529570
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
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.

Butterflies and Railroad Ties

Butterflies and Railroad Ties PDF Author: Caitlin DeSilvey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615122083
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description


Spinal Catastrophism

Spinal Catastrophism PDF Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

The Medium of Contingency

The Medium of Contingency PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: Ridinghouse
ISBN: 9781905464395
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
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.

When Site Lost the Plot

When Site Lost the Plot PDF Author: Robin Mackay
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0957529562
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
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.