Your new book, Snuff Memories, is about to come out. How did this work come about? Snuff Memories has its immediate genesis in a prose piece ‘In the Country of the Broken’, published in Gary Shipley’s journal, gobbet back in 2017. But I guess it goes deeper than that for me. I’ve always had a […]
Tag: Aesthetics
The Creator Sun (feat. Iain Hamilton Grant)
This piece features samples from a recent lecture by Iain Hamilton Grant, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE, which beautifully interlaces the Platonic analogy of the sun with the ideas of a powers ontology – ‘You cannot separate this power from the entity. Being is power’ – while taking his students on a virtual walking […]
Alexander Wilson on Nonhuman Aesthetics and Disconnection
Alexander Wilson’s paper ‘What Aesthetics Tells us About Posthumans’ (WA) provides a synopsis of a challenging account of aesthetics developed at greater length in his new book Aesthesis and Perceptronium (AP). This is nothing less than an aesthetics generalized beyond the human phenomenology cited in philosophies of aesthetic judgement. I’m currently working through AP, so […]
Puce Mary: The Red Desert
The Red Desert’ assembles in layers: loping bass alternates between octaves, raspy continuants top and bottom of the register, randomized clicks over a percussive loop; a susurrus of far off industry, or a cataract softened. A woman’s voice, calmly narrates the indices of her decline in barely accented Danish English: I find myself feeling like […]
XENOPHILIA
* This is the text of a presentation given remotely May 3 2019 at the conference A Sad & Lonely Constellation: Navigating the Antinomies of Technological Hope at the Caffè Letterario in Milan. Its prospectus is “to navigate through the thick swarm of hopes surrounding the body of Artificial Intelligence as it accelerates towards us.” […]
Note on Machine Phenomenology and the Politics of Sounds
The ontological question: What is sound? is typically inflected in a Platonic fashion. It asks after the unitary nature of audibilia. Main Kinds of Auditory Ontology Proximal – sounds are private, non-representational sensations or qualia Medial – ‘sounds are compressive waves in an elastic medium’ (Locke) Locative – sounds are ‘found where they are heard’ […]
Excerpt: Disappearance and Assembly
It is easy to believe nobody built this degradable substrate with that small figurine encysted within, an unsung astronaut; that the condition did not apply or that the machine ‘so disconnected… never got the message.’[1] The pseudo bone increments again. She ascends, follows the hooded figure with the poppy along a drive winding towards the […]
Neorationalist, Posthuman Agency and All that Jazz
My article ‘Promethean and Posthuman Freedom: Brassier on Improvisation and Time’ is out now in Volume 4, Issue 2 of the open-source journal Performance Philosophy. Html and pdf versions are available from the abstract page here
Note on the Aesthetics of Self-Harm
“I’m tortured by the feeling of drowning. Under you, under society, politics, the decay of nature, my lack of interest, and I feel desperate,” Puce Mary (AKA Copenhagen-based artist Frederikke Hoffmeier) is one of the ‘noise’ artists I’ve been listening too increasingly over the last few years (These also include the SF based avant-garde veterans […]
enemyindustry 