Persona non grata : on Deleuze\u27s gratuitous reading of Bataille

For liberal readers of Deleuze, one secret must forever be repressed: Deleuze hated. While his work teems with affirmation, even by way of his less than consensual but favored philosophical analogy of \u27making children/monsters from the back,\u27 there is one thinker too reviled for even Deleuze to thoroughly penetrate: Georges Bataille. While sparse, his remarks on Bataille betray the image of Deleuze as a perpetual affirmation machine. For this reason, Bataille, as the Deleuzian conceptual persona non grata, invites us to consider a state of delirious contamination that was too dangerous to be taken on (from behind). The paper contends that Deleuze\u27s gratuitous hatred of Bataille allows for a rereading of the philosophical problematic of ressentiment and a reassessment of the power of death in Deleuze\u27s own philosophy. We will revisit Bataille\u27s \u27omnidirectional acephalic revolution\u27 to save Deleuze\u27s dark side from the Enlightenment get-along-gang of necrophobic affirmatons

Robert Smithson\u27s abstract geology: revisiting the premonitory politics of the Triassic

[extract] Politics, or A Gnaw That is Ratting In response to an artist symposium question regarding the deepening political crisis in America, Robert Smithson published a piece in Artforum, September 1970, titled Art and the Political Whirlpool or the Politics of Disgust. In it, he said: My \u27position\u27 is one of sinking into an awareness of global squalor and futility. The rat of politics always gnaws at the cheese of art. The trap is set. If there\u27s an original curse, then politics has something to do with it. Direct political action becomes a matter of trying to pick poison out of boiling stew. The pain of this experience accelerates the need for more and more actions

For a minor ornithology

As part of the 15th Jakarta Biennale - Siasat - we curated the performance and installation piece For a Minor Ornithology at the Pasar Burumg Pramuka in Jakarta, Indonesia. Accompanying the performances are a series of diagrams designed with Jono Sturt of HTCHBCK (below), and an essay written with curator Anna-Sophie Springer. The essay, Some Notes For a Minor Ornithology, considers the remarkable role of avifauna in the history of European scientific experiments, public museum displays, and taxidermy practices

Architecture in the Anthropocene

Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy intensifies the potential of this multidisciplinary discourse by bringing together essays, conversations, and design proposals that respond to the “geological imperative” for contemporary architecture scholarship and practice. Contributors include Nabil Ahmed, Meghan Archer, Adam Bobbette, Emily Cheng, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Seth Denizen, Mark Dorrian, Elizabeth Grosz, Lisa Hirmer, Jane Hutton, Eleanor Kaufman, Amy Catania Kulper, Clinton Langevin, Michael C.C. Lin, Amy Norris, John Palmesino, Chester Rennie, François Roche, Ann-Sofi Rönnskog, Isabelle Stengers, Paulo Tavares, Etienne Turpin, Eyal Weizman, Jane Wolff, Guy Zimmerman

A New Element, A New Force, A New Input: Antonio Stoppani's Anthropozoic

The Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani is a remarkable but little known figure in the history of science and the theoretical humanities. Recently, following debates about the Anthropocene initiated by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, some scholars have returned to Stoppani’s writing for its eloquent argument regarding the appearance of human activity in the archive of deep time – the earth. The excerpt below, translated from Stoppani’s three volume Corso di Geologia of 1873, is an example of his breadth of knowledge, courageous imagination, and compelling but accessible rhetorical inventiveness. Nearly thirteen decades before Crutzen’s coinage of the Anthropocene, in this text we find an untimely assessment of the human relation to deep time; perhaps, in the wake of these more recent debates, we finally have ears to hear him

Machinic Apprenticeship

An exploration of machine learning and its conceits through a series of examples of machine-human interactions and learning environments

Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this book explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis, with contributions from artists, curators, theorists and activists. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix (MAP Office), Terike Haapoja & Laura Gustafsson, Laura Hall, Ilana Halperin, Donna Haraway & Martha Kenney, Ho Tzu Nyen, Bruno Latour, Jeffrey Malecki, Mary Mattingly, Mixrice (Cho Jieun & Yang Chulmo), Natasha Myers, Jean-Luc Nancy & John Paul Ricco, Vincent Normand, Richard Pell & Emily Kutil, Tomás Saraceno, Sasha Engelmann & Bronislaw Szerszynski, Ada Smailbegovic, Karolina Sobecka, Zoe Todd, Richard Streitmatter-Tran & Vi Le, Anna-Sophie Springer, Sylvère Lotringer, Peter Sloterdijk, Etienne Turpin, Pinar Yoldas, and Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer & Marina Zurkow

Infrastructure planning through geosocial intelligence: using Twitter as a platform for rapid assessment and civic co-management during flooding in Jakarta

The ability to collect data using sensor-based technologies is increasing within a public technical means. As governments in rapidly-urbanising developing nations seek to address the climatic, social and economic challenges of the 21st century, there is a progressive requirement to map and articulate civil infrastructure. When a local government needs to proactively react to impending and disruptive phenomena they increasingly look to data and technology to help them manage and respond accordingly. Mobile social media, in a citizens-as-sensors paradigm, offers the potential to collect data with which to advance our capacity to understand and promote resilience of cities to both extreme weather events as a result of climate change and to long-term infrastructure transformation as a process of climate adaptation. Location-based social media, in a big-data context, can drive rapid assessment processes of affected areas, and emerging patterns and trends can be revealing about next steps for situational management. This paper emphasises the positive uses of smart systems, drawing on research of infrastructure analysis using geosocial intelligence, in response to seasonal flooding in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. Using a series of real-world examples, we argue that data collected from the field can be secured, anonymised and encrypted to support improved planning and civic co-management of megacities. The factors that affect such bi-directional information flows need to be built on sound principles of basic needs, privacy, and trust at the individual, neighbourhood and city scales

Architecture, adaptive capacities, and the futures of hypercomplexity

I think it is somewhat arbitrary to try to dissociate the effective practice of freedom by people, the practice of social relations, and the spatial distributions in which they find themselves. If they are separated, they become impossible to understand. Each can only be understood through the other. - Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, Powe