Suchergebnisse

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity – "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity" – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

Essays, articles, artworks, and documents taken from and inspired by the symposium on Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, which took place in March 2011 at The New School. Hailed by novelists, philosophers, artists, cinematographers, and designers, Cyclonopedia is a key work in the emerging domains of speculative realism and theory-fiction. The text has attracted a wide-ranging and interdisciplinary audience, provoking vital debate around the relationship between philosophy, geopolitics, geophysics, and art. At once a work of speculative theology, a political samizdat, and a philosophic grimoire, Cyclonopedia is a Deleuzo-Lovecraftian middle-eastern Odyssey populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, and the corpses of ancient gods. Playing out the book's own theory of creativity – "a confusion in which no straight line can be traced or drawn between creator and created – original inauthenticity" – this multidimensional collection both faithfully interprets the text and realizes it as a loving, perforated host of fresh heresies. The volume includes an incisive contribution from the author explicating a key figure of the novel: the cyclone.

A collaborative online Performance by Becky Sik and Sukaina Kubba for Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. The reading was a creative response to Becky Šik's exhibition Mercury and the research practices of both Artists. This online event drew upon the theoretical-fiction novel Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani, and its idea of 'plot-holes' and 'Hidden Writing' to weave their shared interests through a public reading. 'More than a mere interdisciplinary investigation, Hidden Writing suggests a politics of contribution to, or participation with, perforated structures… Reading through the plot holes of a story is possible only by devising a line capable of twisting in and out of them.' Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani The exhibition and online performance was commissioned by Collective Gallery and supported by Creative Scotland, Baillie Gifford, Esmée Fairbairn, Royal Scottish Academy and The Bothy Project.

Après une brève présentation de l'artiste et philosophe iranien Reza Negarestani et de la réception de son livre Cyclonopedia : Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008) dans la nébuleuse du réalisme spéculatif, S. Labrecque présente la première traduction française de l'un des nombreux « excursus » de cet ouvrage. Le court texte intitulé « Modelage de vie » propose une conception à la fois séduisante et horrifiante de la « créativité lépreuse », qui demeure inassignable au divin comme à l'humain puisqu'elle concerne précisément l'affaissement, voire le pourrissement et le mélange boueux de ces deux plans qu'on tente parfois de distinguer sous les noms de transcendance et d'immanence, ou d'idéalité et de matérialité.

In 1927, Nâzım Hikmet composed several poems based on his impressions of his visit to Azerbaijani capital, the city of Baku. They will be included in the collection Song of the Sun-drinkers (1928) and will soon be translated into Russian. The Baku cycle was one of the first attempts at a symbolic representation of petroleum in Russian poetry, in many ways foreshadowing the later poetics of the subject, which will develop on Russian material only in the 2000s. One can look at these poems by Hikmet as one of the first attempts to create a philosophy of petroleum, which will find its most large-scale embodiment in the philosophical novel "Cyclonopedia" by Reza Negarestani, where petroleum constitutes a new type of subjectivity, simultaneously fluid and explosive. On the other hand, the image of petroleum will play a key role in Alexei Parshchikov's poem of the same name, where one can also discern echoes of this philosophy in Hikmet's Baku cycle. For all these authors, petroleum acts as a radical expression of the logic of non-translation: it is a condensed memory of antiquity, which cannot be directly accessed; its mystery cannot be revealed because, in a sense, it contains no mystery. Such a paradoxical semiotics leads all three authors to the idea that petroleum is alien to the human world and has a special inhuman agency.

This article explores nomadic site occupation as a form of planetary colonization involving both human and non-human agents. Conventional understandings of temporary occupation are often humancentric with little attention paid to the disruption of extant site ecologies and processes. The latter are particularly pressing concerns in nomadic settlements located in precarious landscapes. Taking the latter as its focus, this article engages the earth as an agent resisting its own colonization in the Australian-licensed squatter settlement known colloquially as Tin City. Located within the largest mobile sand dune structure in New South Wales, Tin City is an assemblage of several self-built fishing shacks accommodating a nomadic population. Its occupants engage in a daily battle against the shifting sands that threaten to subsume their temporary homes. Located in an area of significant indigenous heritage, the Tin City settlement has become a tourist attraction shrouded in local lore. Current discourses about it and its architectures generally focus on its unusual aesthetics, its contested sociopolitical histories and its ecology, with some discussion on the impacts of European colonization on the sand dune's dynamic geomorphology. To concentrate on the latter, the article develops and deploys the posthumanist conceptualization of the earth posited by Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in his ficto-critical text Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Negarestani ascribes the earth with sentient and agentic capacity, whilst the nomads who traverse its surfaces become the penultimate planetary colonizers. Tin City's occupation thus becomes a story of colonization and resistance narrated by the earth itself, and a reminder that the production and consumption of architectural forms does not need to be confined to that which is conventionally human.