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 ...

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, un...

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked ‘case studies’ in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by ‘painter-researchers.’Rather than outlining a new ‘philosophy of art,’ The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagon...

A rigorous new thinking of the photograph in its relation to science, philosophy, and art, so as to discover an essence of photography that precedes its historical, technological, and aesthetic conditions.If philosophy has always understood its relation to the world according to the model of the instantaneous flash of a photographic shot, how can there be a “philosophy of photography” that is not viciously self-reflexive?Challenging the assumptions made by ...

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...

François Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse.Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure ...

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...

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 gen...

A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land.During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as “rabid nihilism,” “mad black deleuzianism,” and “cybergothic,” developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of “continental philosophy” —a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, bo...

Traversing philosophy and the human sciences, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, this book maps out a history where all is chaos, maelstrom, and fog.If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which under...

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 tech...

A philosophical exploration of pop music that reveals a rich, self-reflexive art form with unsuspected depths.In the first major philosophical treatise on the subject, Agnès Gayraud explores all the paradoxes of pop—its inauthentic authenticity, its mass production of emotion and personal resonance, its repetitive novelty, its precision engineering of seduction—and calls for pop (in its broadest sense, encompassing all genres of popular recorded music) to be recogn...