The Matter of Contradiction

22/08/2013

Workshop / Treignac Projet / 14-18 August 2013

14/08/2013

Andy Weir and Yves Mettler / Weather Report Workshop Thought, Treignac 2012

The Matter of Contradiction is back at Treignac Projet with 14 participants and a new workshop - Periplum: A night without stars

https://vimeo.com/channels/thematterofcontradiction/60638243

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28/07/2013

Benedict Singleton / Maximum Jailbreak

First formulated one hundred and fifty years ago by the heretical scholar Nikolai Federov, the doctrine of cosmism begins with an absolute refusal to treat the most basic factors conditioning life on earth – gravity and time – as necessary constraints on action. As manifest in its early advocates’ intoxicated cheers that humans should storm the heavens and conquer death, cosmism’s foundational gesture was to reformulate the earth as a trap, and understand the role of philosophy, economics and design to be the creation of means to escape it – a heist in which the human species steals itself from the vault.
The force of this radical declaration of intent was swiftly curtailed by the stagey shows of national prowess and political-economic short-circuits of the so-called space race it helped to kick-start. But cosmism, at once a speculative intellectual vector and the design project par excellence, resurges today with new resources at its disposal. From recent work in AI and evolutionary biology to anonymous 13th century Arabic texts that proclaim humans to be more like god than are other animals because they are more cunning, this talk will map out footholds for a contemporary ascent into the dark.

Benedict Singleton is a designer and writer who lives and works in London. He is director and co-founder, with Ilona Gaynor, of the experimental studio The Department of No. Their work draws on architecture, film and writing to articulate sophisticated plots that explore contemporary developments in design, technology, politics, economics and law, and has been presented in venues around the world. The studio’s current major project, Under Black Carpets - a plan for the largest bank heist ever to be committed - will be debuted in a disused bank vault at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Sept. 2013.

https://vimeo.com/71172984

FIND THE FULL WRITTEN VERSION HERE : http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/ First formulated one hundred and fifty years ago by the heretical scholar…

27/07/2013

Simon O'Sullivan / On the Production of Subjectivity

Slavoj Zizek has remarked in a recent collection of writings on the so-called ‘Speculative Turn’ in continental philosophy that what the latter lacks is a theory of the subject. Although I would not claim that what I have laid out in my recent book On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation amounts to the missing subject of this speculative turn (indeed, to a certain extent, the category of the subject is a necessary exclusion that determines the latter), what I would say is that my own project – a work of commentary, but also a thinking through of a production of subjectivity that refuses the bar between the finite and the infinite – has some resonances with some of the thinkers associated with this particular strain of recent post-Kantian philosophy. In my contribution to the conference I will briefly map out some of these ‘relations of adjacency’ and more generally introduce the themes of my work on subjectivity. I will also draw the five key diagrams of the book’s title.

Simon O’Sullivan is Senior Lecturer in Art History/Visual Culture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has published two monographs with Palgrave, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (2005) and On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (2012), and is the editor, with Stephen Zepke, of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He also makes art, with David Burrows and others, under the name Plastique Fantastique.

https://vimeo.com/71040441

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE CONFERENCE HERE:http://www.mediafire.com/download/x6pndyzsa3bfqpy/simon_o_sullivan_composite_diagrams_and_relations_of_adjacency.pdf NOTES…

26/07/2013

Kirsten Cooke & Dale Holmes / A Brief Introduction to Material Conjectures

For this ten minute presentation the co-authors of Material Conjectures (curator Kirsten Cooke and artist Dale Holmes) will begin by presenting a brief and accurate account of the groups’ research. This will be done by identifying the political, aesthetic and philosophical terrain upon which Material Conjectures’ research builds and intervenes.
This will be followed by a description of the groups’ previous events, which will be juxtaposed with images (if a projector is provided).
The presentation will close with a brief discussion centred on upcoming Material Conjectures events (e.g. Asymmetrical Cinema exhibition and publication) and speculation on future directions in symposiums, publications and exhibitions of artworks.

Kirsten Cooke is a curator and her most recent project, titled Turbulent Surfaces, took place as three distinct platforms at the Brook Theatre and kynastonmcshine (2011-2012). She is also part of the collective Material Conjectures, which is a cross disciplinary project co-authored by the artist Dale Holmes and herself. She teaches Fine Art, Curatorial Practice, and Object Orientated Theories at Chelsea College of Art, the University of Kent and the University of Reading where she is currently undertaking a practice led PhD.

Dale Holmes is an artist interested in the visual, political and philosophical legacies of abstraction. Recent exhibitions include AB ST RA CT at Essays and Observations, Berlin, Germany (2011), Turbulent Surfaces at the Brook Theatre, Maidstone, Kent (2011), and Sunrise Shine in a Midnight Sky at SIA Gallery, Sheffield (2011). He teaches at Sheffield Hallam University, Huddersfield University and is currently an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University in the Art and Design Research Centre working with Dr. Jaspar Joseph-Lester (DoS).
https://vimeo.com/channels/thematterofcontradiction/71013496

FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE:http://www.mediafire.com/download/4w8mp6b1bezs76g/kirsten_cooke_dale_holmes_material_conjectures.pdf For this ten minute presentation the…

25/07/2013

Robin Mackay / The Barker Topos (A Pitch)

Superposing philosophical treatise / action thriller / site-specific work, surface will be read as symptom, and the investigator as already implicated in the contingencies of the plot, as new perspectives are opened up on the perennial philosophical question of how local and contingent phenomena focalize and express the universal – with the latter understood not as universal ratio or Hegelian Geist, but as the ‘universal history of material contingency’ invoked in Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
What is called for is a combination of CSI: Earth (examining the terrestrial crime scene and making objects speak) and a Bourne Identity-style quest (a search for identities lost in an ever-deepening web of cosmic conspiracy): A new mode of investigation that combines Freud and Ferenczi’s model of trauma and an abstraction of the ‘time-travelling’ and narrative methods of psychoanalysis, with a reading of earth sciences and natural sciences as resources for a ‘cryptography of the earth’ inspired by but surpassing Nietzsche’s ‘genealogy’ and Deleuze/Guattari’s ‘geophilosophy’.
Finding the thread or plot that leads from symptom to trauma, from crime scene to conspiracy, calls for a method that combines a formalisation of the trauma model both on local and global levels and a depth-tracking of the complicities involved (using mathematical category theory, sheaf theory and topos theory) with a multidisciplinary synthesis of modern sciences and philosophy. This new method enables us to formally define rigorous modes of navigation between global and local, and to elaborate criteria for distinguishing trivial from non-trivial plotlines (the good ‘lead’ from the bad).
The superficially commonplace crime scene is continually reframed by the navigation through ramified spaces of trauma, changing its aspect kaleidoscopically as the narrative brings into focus the different material distributions to which it belongs. With this twisted return of the ordinary (the simplicity of everyday life revealed as an encapsulated ramified path structure), theory attains an immanence with fictional affect, in the purportedly ineffable depth of metaphysical horror: As the protagonist repeatedly asks himself ‘where am I? Where did I come from? On what path am I moving?’, he finds himself set upon yet other paths, faced with broader landscapes of navigation, in too deep, unable to extricate himself from plots that reach far beyond the terrestrial sphere.
https://vimeo.com/70952340

Superposing philosophical treatise / action thriller / site-specific work, surface will be read as symptom, and the investigator as already implicated in the contingencies…

24/07/2013

Robin Mackay / No Core Dump: Pamela Rosenkranz's Speculative L'Orealism

https://vimeo.com/70721684

Robin Mackay is a philosopher and director of UK arts organization Urbanomic, which promotes research activities addressing crucial issues in philosophy and science…

25/06/2013

Benedict Singleton / Maximum Jailbreak was part of The Matter of Contradiction:War against the sun.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak/

Space travel produced some of the defining images of the twentieth century. Sputnik, Apollo, the spacesuit, the NASA logo and the toy-like outline of the space shuttle, liftoffs with all their countdown drama, and the peaceful image of the earth like a mica fleck against coal black; the weird underw...

24/06/2013

Josephine Berry Slater / Process Processed

After his death an abscess was found at the back of the patient Broussonet’s brain, thus explaining the reasons for his loss of memory of substantive words in life. Georges Canguilhem uses this anecdote from the annals of medicine to explain how the establishment of norms doesn’t precede the experience of pathology or disease, but instead arises through the threat to life’s possibility. Furthermore, the establishment of norms (which therapeutics/medicine aim to return the body to), he argued, is part of life’s struggle against what threatens it (and shouldn’t be seen as a purely anthropomorphic activity). Can we read the development of aesthetics in related terms? If that which threatens human life can be thought of in terms of its own production, by way of reason, of processes which it can no longer control (total nuclear destruction, climate chaos, resource exhaustion, thanatopolitics), in other words if pathology is endemic to the human condition, then how are the resulting norms, retroactively given, discovered and deployed by art? Life is both what threatens life and what gives rise to an immunological and therapeutic response, and art participates on both sides of the divide: it gives form to the order that produces pathologies (the naturalisation of power occurring through naturalised cultural forms) and attempts to release life from its sickness (the grasping of norms from the flux by way of cutting, ‘partage’, the creation of visibilities, finding abscesses). When the key modality of art becomes its annexation of process (as an effect of a wider annexation of life within biopolitics and capitalist real subsumption, as well as science’s discovery that all is (in) process), how does its operation start to mutate? Norms are often proposed through postmodern art’s deployment of participation, but regularly precede/inform rather than result from process (bad relational aesthetics/new media’s concepts of interactivity). But at its wildest, the art of modernity opens itself to the destabilisation of its system by way of as yet unnormativised process which, in turn, gives rise to the discovery of new norms which can, albeit briefly, be turned against that which threatens both art and life. Thus aesthetic immunity acts for and against life.

https://vimeo.com/channels/thematterofcontradiction/68912543

DOWNLOAD THE FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE:http://www.mediafire.com/download/8jyczm7e8i2b2vx/josephine-berry-slater-process_processed.pdf After his death an abscess…

17/06/2013

Fabien Giraud / The Suffocation of Birds

DUE TO SOUND ISSUES WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DOWNLOAD AND READ THE TRANSCRIPT HERE:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/5j7jadtutzfh5r5/fabien_giraud_THESUFFOCATIONOFBIRDS.pdf

It is common to trace back the genealogy of the modern era to the discovery of the void in 1665: the extraction of air from a sealed sphere of glass and the death of a bird as the sign of an irreversible separation. Of such an apparatus and the observation of its enclosed funest world we made the foundations of our shattered relation to the real. But if - from the interior of a space station - we watch the inert body of a bird drifting away in the vacuum of the outside, it is only because the sphere has now fully everted itself.
This talk proposes a model to think through and within this topological accident from which we inherit.

http://vimeo.com/68493025

DUE TO SOUND ISSUES, WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DOWNLOAD AND READ THE TRANSCRIPT. FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE: http://www.mediafire.com/download/5j7jadtutzfh5r5/fabien_giraud_THESUFFOCATIONOFBIRDS.pdf…

01/06/2013

Sam Basu / In the Witches Drowning

Sam Basu will read, In the Witches Drowning, a short text jointly written with Sabrina Tarasoff. It is a poetic meditation on immersion: communal, ecological, psychedelic and psychotic in relation to the difficulties encountered by Antonin Artaud in maintaining the subject-object distinction. Deep diving, the coven and drowning, figure on the way through this occult writing exchange between the authors, which is as much an investigation of communal writing as a considered reflection on Artaud’s subjectile.

https://vimeo.com/channels/thematterofcontradiction/67441419

DOWNLOAD THE FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE:http://www.mediafire.com/download/kl1ib0ctb2nbdg1/sam_basu_In_the_Witches_Drowning.pdf Sam Basu will read, In the Witches…

30/05/2013

Ida Soulard / Heal the knife that cuts the wound

On March 11th 2011 at 2.46 pm local time, a 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Japanese archipelago. Less than an hour after, the first waves of the tsunami started crashing on the east coast of Japan. Entire cities were devastated, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was almost entirely flooded, more than 15 000 persons died and around 4000 disappeared. The day after, at 3.36pm a first hydrogen explosion occurred in the reactor n°1 and was transmitted by the international broadcasting system. On the 16th, another explosion in reactor n°2 damaged the containment building and led to the fear of a reactor core meltdown accident.
From few days after artists went to the Tohoku region to confront those two new landscapes, different in nature as well as in their regime of representation: the Catastrophic - made of rubbles, debris and destruction, sculpted by the violence of the combined earthquake and tsunami -and the Disastrous - bathed in the invisible light of radioactivity. But in both cases, the question of the real, either overwhelming or insufficient, has been a core issue when all immunological spheres have been burst. The threat is not an outsider anymore, but comes from a reflexive modernity that looped upon itself and consequently led to this phenomenon: the gentpatsu-shinsai, a “natural” catastrophe leading to a nuclear accident,half-human, half-geological. What we today call the Anthropocene is a dynamic that erodes even more the above categories and makes the difference between geological and human, natural and artificial, even thinner.
How artists worked from, within and with the “Tohoku crisis”? How this crisis also worked and shaped new artistic practices? How did artists try to think from within this emergency of the present? This case study will focus on and discuss several artistic strategies developed by artists on the aftermath of the Tohoku crisis. By confronting the very specific and new situation of our time, these artists and productions can serve as models for defining an art of the Anthropocene. Fukushima is not a Japanese issue.

https://vimeo.com/channels/thematterofcontradiction/67272673

On March 11th 2011 at 2.46 pm local time, a 8.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Japanese archipelago. Less than an hour after, the first waves of the tsunami started…