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Category Archives: Art

A response to Jussi Parikka: or why materialism ‘encounter’ has lost its efficacy

23-Dec-11

Most of you have probably read Jussi Parikka’s latest piece on some Object Oriented Questions about OOO HERE; the comments are well worth a read if not for the usual can of worms OOO usually opens in the blogosphere. Paul Caplan replied HERE and Levi HERE, Graham’s also just replied with THESE TWO posts. But rather than repeat other responses, I thought [...]

Signal: Noise event, London, Jan 20th

15-Dec-11

On Jan 20th, I’ll be moderating and/or presenting a talk in a panel for Signal:Noise. It’s with German poetic-code engineer legend Florian Cramer and Italian anti-human chaotic-computational aesthetics legend Luciana Parisi. If you know these two extraordinary writer’s works (and personalities) you’ll know this will be an interesting discussion. It’s hosted by MUTE and the School of [...]

Actor Recursion Theory (ART) Procedure and Presentness

14-Dec-11

Thats the title of my paper which has been accepted for the Aesthetics in the 21st Century Conference Sept 13th – 15th 2012 at the University of Basel. Details will be on their website, but I’ll post the abstract here for those interested;   Actor Recursion Theory (ART): Procedure and Presentness “The view that machines [...]

Thomas Gokey’s College debt artwork

12-Oct-11

Here is fellow Speculations editor Thomas Gokey’s piece ‘Total Amount Of Money Rendered In Exchange for a Masters Of Fine Arts Degree to the School of Art Institute of Chicago, Pulped into Four Sheets of Paper.” Clearly it’s a piece which needs no further commentary.

Technics, Time and Twitter

21-Sep-11

A friend of mine (an artist who wishes to remain anonymous) has embarked on the vast project of discrete-ising Bernard Stiegler’s entire Technics and Time corpus as tweets. @TechnicsAndTime can found and followed HERE. In his own words; The goal is to edit it into sentences of no more than 140 chars, with no cheating like using [...]

God Damn – I should be in Istanbul for ISEA 11

17-Sep-11

There are some amazing panels on here. These types of events must be a nightmare to organise. Heres my choice cut of panels that look amazing; Click on more to see.

A thought on encounter

17-Sep-11

If it is widely asserted that, quoting Bourriaud, art is a state of encounter, what is it that we actually encounter? It’s basically a typical materialist (Bourriaud cites Althusser) method of praxis. An aesthetic method steeped in a paradoxical contingent deliberation. How does one seek creativity in a world of pure relation? If an artist [...]

A Supernova is visible this week

07-Sep-11

Here it is. All you’ll need is a strong pair of binoculars apparently. I *love* how the media tend to dress these cosmological events like they are art show previews or the latest commercial cinema release. This an important event; one that should address or make light of our fragility in the universe. Instead its [...]

Paul Caplan on David Berry’s The Philosophy of Software

05-Sep-11

His brief thoughts HERE. Well worth a look. Here are his final thoughts concerning the lack of object oriented-ness in Berry’s new book. “Berry’s philosophy is certainly object-centred but it is not object-oriented in the sense in which I am seeking to use Harman’s quadruple object. For Berry objects do not exceed their relations. They [...]

Greenberg’s Bogostian moment.

01-Sep-11

One of my favourite lines from Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 1982. Why is it Bogostian? It’s not something I have time to put into words, but notice the technicality of language Greenberg uses; procedure, operation, competence. “Modernism criticizes from the inside, through [...]