Speculative Realities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Speculative Aesthetics (Introduction) by Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford
Documenting and expanding upon a ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics, this discussion 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 recon gured aesthetics that is indissociable from sociotechnical conditions. CONTENTS Introduction AMANDA BEECH Art and its 'Science' BENEDICT SINGLETON Speculative Design TOM TREVATT The Cosmic Address Discussion NICK SRNICEK Accelerationism - Epistemic, Economic, Political JAMES TRAFFORD Towards a Speculative Rationalism ALEX WILLIAMS The Politics of Abstraction RAY BRASSIER Prometheanism and Real Abstraction Discussion MARK FISHER Practical Eliminativism: Getting Out of the Face, Again ROBIN MACKAY Neo-Thalassa: A Fantasia on a Fantasia BEN WOODARD Uncomfortable Aesthetics Discussion SPECULATIVE AESTHETICS Eds. Robin Mackay, Luke Pendrell, James Trafford 20 October 2014 Paperback 148x210mm, 140pp. ISBN 978-0-9575295-7-1 http://www.urbanomic.com/pub\_speculativeaesthetics.php
(2017) Reality Check: An overview of what artists, or choose to define, as reality
The First NGV Triennale Catalogue, 2017
In this publication more than fifty thought leaders respond to the exhibition with essays, opinion pieces and other creative responses that offer divergent perspectives on the themes of Movement, Change, Virtual, Body and Time. Amongst them are: Ewan McEoin, Simon Maidment, Megan Patty, Pip Wallis, editors and contributors. Publisher: National Gallery of Victoria. (Limp bound softcover, with loose (screen printed) French folded linen jacket. 688 pages. Fully illustrated in colour. ISBN: 9781925432442. December 2017.)
2014
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 sociotechnica...
The Techniques of Existence, Unforeseen
This eBook, the sixth in the series of Blowup Readers released by V2_, explores the significance of the recent philosophic movements known as Object-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism for the visual and media arts.
Realities & Fantasies - Workshop of the Amsterdsam School for Cultural Analysis April 2019
ASCA Workshop 2019 ‘Realities and Fantasies’ Relations, Transformations, Discontinuities 10-12 April, organized by Divya Nadkarni, Alex Thinius, Nadia de Vries. Keynote lectures: • Jonathan Culler (Cornell University): Fantasizing Narrators for Novels and Speakers for Poems • Annabelle Dufourcq (RU Nijmegen): Do we have to be Realistic? The imaginary dimension of the real: a phenomenological approach to imagination, images and the imaginary field. • Nkiru Nzegwu (SUNY Binghamton): Dancing the In-Between: The Immense Power of Madness • Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku): Thinking Sex, Thinking Play “Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with. It is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established; to forgo our fantasies would be to forgo our touch with the world.” (Stanley Cavell) What are the contemporary ways in which reality and fantasy relate, how do they contrast, and how, under what conditions, can one transform into the other? In the workshop, artists and scholars from a range of approaches, cases, and places, discuss the kinship between realities and fantasies and its contemporary use. Papers focus on love and desire in the time of tinder, AI, authenticity, narrative selves, enactment, transliminality, futurism, utopism, nationalisms, absurdity, oppressive regimes, trauma, ‘grotesque’ bodies, animal sanctuaries, magical realism, sound, intentionality, discovery between arts and science, and the normative use of art and literature. Next to paper presentations, there is an exhibition, and a workshop performance. Keynote lectures will take place in Doelenzaal, Singel 425, the concluding keynote panel will be in the VOC zaal, Bushuis. Everyone is welcome to the keynotes and panels. More info: https://realitiesfantasies.wordpress.com/
Art and infrastructure - Making alternative futures: Instituting in a 'weird' world. PARTS 1, 2, & 3
Temporary Arts Review, 2018
When reality seems to shift so quickly, and often with such little concern for so-called objective truths, is there any point left in searching for more stable ground by critiquing the institutions that once defined it? Where does one even begin when the Emperor doesn’t care that they’re naked? From another perspective, we might even say that seemingly objective representations of reality have simply been made obsolete by now openly interested and contingent worlds. Interested as they are, they offer (or demand) participation in narratives that redefine the present enough to bring in to being impossible-seeming futures – like reality TV stars as world leaders. In this reality, it would seem that TV’s most recently contagious formats, reality TV and scripted reality, are not just products of this world. They make it. In this three-part text, originally published by Temporary Arts Review, I explore what this has to do with instituting, it’s perhaps best to begin with that relationship between narrative and reality.
Monika Behrens interviews Graham Harman about Object Oriented Ontology and his concept of the allure. Behrens is currently undertaking a painting led enquiry into how objects relate to each other within a painted space. Her research is attempting to reconfigure an aesthetic that allows the painted objects in a painted space to comprehend and relate to each other outside of the general understanding of aesthetics that we project onto the still life painting tradition. Harman explains how concepts found in Object Oriented Ontology can relate to the painted object. In particular, the interview unpacks concepts that may form an argument around objects within still life paintings containing ‘allure’ beyond semiotic and iconographic interpretations of represented objects. Behrens and Harman strongly agree that art can deepen our relationship to objects by rediscovering the real, when the real, as Harman says, cannot be paraphrased in terms of literal propositions, literal qualities.
Object Oriented Ontology and Contemporary Art (Part 2)
In this essay I act as an art theorist/critic as well as philosopher. The two notions of the Harmanian object that I get most out of at present is its strange formulation of unity (the possibility of a real, unified and intentional object) and a notion of the objects withdrawal or withheld nature (which I crudely turn into the notion of absence - as that which is not present in our ongoing re-formulations of objects). Now, it seems to me that through my brief research into O.O.O inspired artworks, such artworks show the opposite inclination; 1) to revitalise the lurking horrific reality of objects in everyday life (presence). 2) that we must go to the farthest depths of the universe to acquire ‘objects’ that appear alien to humans or could be hypostatised to exist without, before or after humans (difference). I have no interest in these aesthetic concerns (I do not find a piece of the moon any more or less philosophically complex than a sandwich). Both are more than the relations of access we infer from them, both are more than the components made-up of them, and both exceed their outward effects. Also, I would argue that positioning the object outside of thought and/or human existence in this way is an idealist experiment analogous to the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. O.O.O is not a human-world philosophy nor is it a philosophy of human skepticism, it is a philosophy of multiple individual objects (and also, I don't even know how my own body or thoughts exist, let alone a tree in the woods). I think it is possibly more difficult to illustrate the notions of unity and absence in Harman’s work in art, than that of difference and presence. I have attempted to do so through two artworks. One is Vito Acconci’s ‘Room Piece’ (1970) and the other is John Stezaker’s ‘Mack’ (2007).