Urbanomic Media Ltd – förlag

An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural collection that decenters familiar narratives to provide a fresh perspective on what artificial intelligence is today, and what it might become.Historians, media theorists, science-fiction writers, philosophers, and artists from China and elsewhere reexamine the nation’s intense engagement with AI, moving beyond the clichés that still dominate contemporary debate.Today, visions of the contested future of AI veer between common planetary goals and a new Cold War, as culturally-specific models of intelligence, speculative traditions, and thought experiments come up against the emergence of novel forms of cognition that cannot be reduced to any historical cultural tradition.This uniquely positioned volume provides expert insight into this tension, using China as a touchstone for rethinking "artificiality" and "intelligence" as sites of difference in a way that is already present in the difficulty of precisely translating the Chinese term 人工智能. Tracking the history of Chinese AI from the pre-Cultural Revolution to the post-Deng Xiaoping eras right up to contemporary debates surrounding facial recognition, the writers in this collection draw on a mixture of speculative thought experiments and cutting-edge use cases to offer singular views on topics including AI and Chinese philosophy, AI ethics and policymaking, the development of computational models in early Chinese cybernetics, and the aesthetics of Sinofuturism.Spanning borders between different worlds, histories, futures, and foundational models, Machine Decision is Not Final is not only a timely reappraisal of the stakes of AI development, but a tool for constructing more global imaginaries for the future of AI.ContributorsBlaise Aguera y Arcas, Bo An, Benjamin Bratton, Shuang Frost, Vince Garton, Steve Goodman, Yvette Granata, Anna Greenspan, Amy Ireland, Xia Jia, Bogna Konior, Vincent Le, Lawrence Lek, Lukas Likavcan, Suzanne Livingston, Iris Long, Bingchun Meng, Reza Negarestani, Chen Quifan, Gabriele de Seta, Hongzhe Wang, Wang Xin, Mi You

Neorationalism as a distinctive philosophical trajectory, exploring the outermost possibilities of Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Enlightenment.What is the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century? Today more than ever, in the face of disinformation, memetic plagues, and neuroactive media, if we are to resist not just the continual solicitation of our cognitive reflexes, but also the unearned authority of endless everyman rationalists and self-appointed secular priests of rationality, then we have no choice but to mobilize Reason to continually dissect the responsibilities they shirk, and to embrace the future demands of thought. Peter Wolfendale has long been dedicated to this philosophical task, and The Revenge of Reason lays out his vision for Neorationalism as a distinctive philosophical trajectory, exploring the outermost possibilities of Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Enlightenment. This volume collects interviews and writings on various philosophical figures and topics, addressing the deepest questions of Physis, Logos, and Ethos—all with exemplary clarity and pedagogical generosity. Against those who would chain the fate of humanity to its animal nature, Wolfendale’s work makes the case for unbinding our rationality from every petty naturalism and every fixed image of thought, heralding an inhuman destiny unleashed by the revenge of Reason.

A profound rethinking of the political categories of openness and closedness.In a new work building upon his Philosophy of the Tourist, Hiroki Azuma reconsiders the connection between the figure of the tourist and that of the family. Setting out from the reevaluation of the family as a figure of containment following the COVID-19 pandemic, in this exploration of the inside and outside of community, Azuma questions the shifting values of openness and security, challenging the distinction between the openness of civil society and the closedness of the family, which he deciphers as an artefact of a Western philosophical standpoint in which polis is opposed to oikos.Via Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and Kripke’s interpretation of language games, Azuma develops a new concept of the family as a closed unit that is paradoxically open to drastic transformations of its own rules of inclusion. The tourist, an anomaloous agent that escapes Carl Schmitt’s opposition between friend and enemy, can then be reinterpreted as a familial figure.In this subtle rethinking of some of the most fundamental categories of modern political economy, the topology of the open society is reconfigured beyond the opposition between conservatism and liberalism: through close readings of Rorty and Arendt, Azuma sketches out a new vision of an open polis supported by the transformative sustainability of the oikos.

A remarkably clear explication of the tenets of Object-Oriented Philosophy and an acute critique of the movement's ramifications for philosophy today.

Collection of interventions on the status of the moving image in an age of advanced simulation, exploring the contemporary links between power, simulation, and warfare.

An artist examines the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l'Europe, and Europaplatzes and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe.”

If the built environment is a record of our modes of organization and the compromises we make in order to live together, then what are we to make of the plethora of Europe Squares, Europa Places, Places de l'Europe, and Europaplatzes? Public spaces that connect numerous disparate towns and cities through a “supersite” called Europe, they may appear as avatars of an idea in crisis, as “eurocentric values” and the concept of Europe as a unified political space are attacked and eroded from all sides.

Atlas Europe Square documents a body of work by Swiss artist Yves Mettler who, since 2003, has engaged in an ongoing mapping and documentation of these sites, along with a series of projects triangulating between particular squares, interrogating their differing architectural, environmental, and public functions, and what they tell us about the ideality of “Europe” and the (im)possibility of its concrete instantiation.Here this work is extended into reflections on the relationship between art and public space, site-specificity, and the artist's own implication in the imaginary of Europe as he becomes enmeshed in a network of projects, funds, and public bodies that seek to promote "European culture" through art.Alongside extensive photographic documentation, Atlas Europe Square contains texts by the artist alongside essays by Reza Negarestani, Teresa Pullano, Laurent Thévenot, and Stephen Zepke, discussing Mettler's work.

A riotous new take on a classic fictional dystopia, with an all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink. With 2+2=5, George Orwell's flawed masterpiece finally receives a much-needed rectification, as Jake Chapman takes us on a bad trip into an atrocious alt-Eurasia--a nightmare utopia of 24/7 self-expression, mandatory wellbeing, yogic breathing, and promiscuous empathy. Yippie wonks in open-toed sandals have ejected the evil capitalist overlords, compassion and charity reign supreme, buckwheat salad and artisan cashew cheese are in plentiful supply, and all strive to live their best life, all the time.Employed by the Ministry to rectify misfortunes issuing from a curious glitch in the system, Winston Smith finds that his creative urges are unexpectedly awoken, and he is driven to express his deepest place, voice, and hurt through the medium of poetry. But what connects Winston's furtive scribblings in My Big Book of Me to the unpleasantnesses emanating from the deep glitch? Is Julia really the perfect kooky carefree soulmate she seems to be? Can O'Brien be trusted? And when does the new season of Big Brother start?An all-you-can-eat quinoa buffet of wrongthink, Chapman's twisted vision is a bracing reminder that dystopia is just wishful thinking, and that the worst can always get worster.

Insights into the intelligence throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and under our skin.Is there a way to understand the materials that surround us not as passive objects, but as other intelligences interacting with our own? In Parallel Minds, expert in materials science and nanotechnology Laura Tripaldi delivers not only detailed insights into the properties and emergent behaviors of matter as revealed by state-of-the-art chemistry, synthetic biology, and nanotech, but also a rich philosophical reflection that crosses the frontier between nature and culture, where the most cutting-edge scientific syntheses resonate with ancient myth. The result is a technomaterial bestiary full of unexpected encounters with “strange minds”—from cobwebs to kevlar and carbon fibre, from centaurs to amoebas to arachnids, from polycephalic slime to resonating plasmons, from viruses to golems.  Parallel Minds reveals the intelligence at large throughout the natural and technical environment, in the fabric of our devices and dwellings, in our clothes, and even under our skin. Full of lateral ideas and unexpected images, Tripaldi’s book imbues the study and synthesis of materials with a new urgency. For not only do the materials that surround us participate actively in the construction of the world in which we live, but harnessing their ability to interact intelligently with their environment could be the key to the future of our species.

Grelet's solitary sailor is a radical theoretical figure, herald angel of an existential rebellion against the world and against philosophy's world-thought.Over a decade ago, Gilles Grelet left the city to live permanently on the sea, in silence and solitude, with no plans to return to land, rarely leaving his boat Théorème. An act of radical refusal, a process of undoing one by one the ties that attach humans to the world, for Grelet this departure was also inseparable from an ongoing campaign of anti-philosophy. Like François Laruelle's "ordinary man" or Rousseau's "solitary walker," Grelet's solitary sailor is a radical theoretical figure, herald angel of an existential rebellion against the world and against philosophy's world-thought, point zero of an anti-philosophy as rigorous gnosis, and apprentice in the herethics of navigation.More than a set of scattered reflections, less than a system of thought, Theory of the Solitary Sailor is a gnostic device. It answers the supposed necessity of realizing the world-thought that is philosophy (or whatever takes its place) with a steadfast and melancholeric refusal. As indifferently serene and implacably violent as the ocean itself, devastating for the sufficiency of the world and the reign of semblance, this is a lived anti-philosophy, a perpetual assault waged from the waters off the coast of Brittany, amid sea and wind.

How one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism Hélio Oiticica presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures.“The IMAGE-grip is dislocated and a more fundamental element emerges: in short, IMAGE is not the work’s supreme motive or unifying end.”—Hélio Oiticica  At the turn of the 1950s–1960s, one of the leading artists of Neo-Concretism, Hélio Oiticica, presaged the unique trajectory of Brazilian contemporary art with his intensive color-architectures. In the wake of this vivência of “time-color,” which subordinates the aesthetic to the sensorimotor powers of color, Oiticica’s transcategorial, transmedia works critically and clinically undermine physical and social architecture, while semiotically subverting the forms of domination exerted by the image. In this culmination of their reassessment of the relation among art, philosophy, and the contemporary, Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne show how these works are exemplary not only of a truly diagrammatic thought and practice, but also of the South’s resistance against the coldly indifferent globalism endemic to the pacified institutions of contemporary art. Oiticica’s tropicalization of the commonplaces of sixties art signals the latent potential of a marginal dissidence from both the aesthetic form of art and the conceptual form of anti-art.

A beautifully produced anthology of crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers's pioneering blockchain art, along with a selection of her essays, reviews, and fictions.DAO? BTC? NFT? ETH? ART? WTF? HODL as OG crypto-artist, writer, and hacker Rhea Myers searches for faces in cryptographic hashes, follows a day in the life of a young shibe in the year 2032, and patiently explains why all art should be destructively uploaded to the blockchain. Now an acknowledged pioneer whose work has graced the auction room at Sotheby’s, Myers embarked on her first art projects focusing on blockchain tech in 2011, making her one of the first artists to engage in creative, speculative, and conceptual engagements with "the new internet." Proof of Work brings together annotated presentations of Myers’s blockchain artworks along with her essays, reviews, and fictions—a sustained critical encounter between the cultures and histories of the artworld and crypto-utopianism, technically accomplished but always generously demystifying and often mischievous.  Her deep understanding of the technical history and debates around blockchain technology is complemented by a broader sense of the crypto movement and the artistic and political sensibilities that accompanied its ascendancy. Remodeling the tropes of conceptual art and net.art to explore what blockchain technology reveals about our concepts of value, culture, and currency, Myers’s work has become required viewing for anyone interested in the future of art, consensus, law, and collectivity.

Explorations of the audio essay as medium and method.With contributors including Justin Barton, Angus Carlyle, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, and Iain Sinclair, Sonic Faction presents extended lines of thought prompted by two Urbanomic events which explored the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought.Three recent pieces provide the catalyst for a discussion of the potential of the "audio essay" as medium and method, a machine for intensifying listening and unsettling the boundaries between existing forms: documentary, music, ambient sound, audiobook, field recording, radio play….Kode9’s Astro-Darien (2022) is a sonic fiction about simulation, presenting an alternative history of the Scottish Space Programme, haunted by the ghosts of the British Empire. Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land (2006) is a dreamlike account of a coastal walk that expands into questions of modernity, capitalism, fiction, and the micropolitics of escape. Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2021) is a meditation on time, disappearance, and loss as heard through the fictions of Lovecraft, Ccru, and the spectre of Dunwich, the city that vanished beneath the waves.Alongside photographic documentation of the events and edited transcripts of the artists’ discussions, Sonic Faction brings together contributors with diverse perspectives to address the question of the audio essay and to imagine its future.ContributorsLawrence Abu Hamdan, Lendl Barcelos, Justin Barton, Ben Borthwick, Angus Carlyle, Matt Colquhoun, Jessica Edwards, Kodwo Eshun, Steve Goodman, Ayesha Hameed, Eleni Ikoniadou, Lawrence Lek, Robin Mackay, Paul Nataraj, Emily Pethick, Iain Sinclair, Shelley Trower

An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

Mapping out multiple paths through Gabriel Catren’s innovative psychedelic work of transcendental philosophy.In Pleromatica, Gabriel Catren confronts the most fundamental challenges of modernity. It is a major philosophical work that kicks against postmodern nihilism in a style that digests the ventriloquizing transpoetics of Leminski, the neobaroque queerness of Néstor Perlongher, the cannibalism of Oswald De Andrade, and the startling imagery of Lezama Lima, a post-Grothendieckian reconfiguration of transcendental philosophy, a "phenoumenodelic" trip through multiple kaleidoscopic perspectives on life and matter to the far side of "speculative realism," a fever vision of a hypothetical speculative, trans-specific, noncolonial and nonextractivist modernity, Catren’s ‘lanjaguar’, confronting the Kantian heritage, but infused with the vivência and razonabilidad of Latin American thought and the perspectivist Amazonian anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, constitutes a veritable UFO in the philosophical skies. In this collection, contributors from a wide range of philosophical perspectives assess the speculative achievements of Pleromatica and extend the new perspectives that Catren’s book opens up for thought.

Two original essays scrutinize the use of acoustic camouflage, and the function of toolkits as maps of internal dread and environmental threat.The weaponization of listening, and the technical cartography of anxiety. Two original essays scrutinize the use of acoustic camouflage, and the function of toolkits as maps of internal dread and environmental threat.  In Phantom Lure Angus Carlyle explores the ways in which the frequency spectrum can become a site for disguise and deception. Acoustic camouflage is deployed in the concrete curves of sound mirrors, military battlefield sensors, and snipers’ sonic concealment tactics, but also in the silent steps of the hunter and the mimicry of duck calls, antler rattles, and fox flutes.  This trail of decoys leads us into forensic acoustic analysis, electronic voice phenomena, and music encrypted with secret signals—from Metal Gear Solid to "Windowlicker," from moths’ thoraxes to horror-film whispers, from Silent Escape to Turing tests and vocoders. Sam Forsythe’s Every Day Catastrophes is an essay for the anxious, the paranoid, and the overly prepared. From the everyday carry of the urban explorer to the bug-out bag for total apocalypse, the toolkits we assemble in order to forestall anticipated yet unforeseen disasters are abstract environmental maps. Tools compress place, matter, and relation into the portable abstractions of points, edges, and levers. But they also embody inner landscapes, topographies shaped by anxiety and fear. Every Day Catastrophes navigates this terrain of technics and terror, exploring how we equip ourselves for the unspecified threat conditions of modern life and tool up for anxiety-inducing futures.

Startling pulp theory-fictions, forays into cyberculture, occultural studies and popular numerics, paranoid cosmic conspiracy, and schizoid tactics for escaping the reality system recovered from the prehistoric lore of Lemurian Time Sorcery. From before the beginning (which was also, according to them, already the end), the adepts of the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton have worked tirelessly to secure the past, present, and future against the incursions of Neolemurian time-sorcery, eliminating all polytemporal activity, stitching up the future, sealing every breach and covering every track. According to the AOE, the CCRU “does not, has not, and will never exist.” And yet… The texts collected here document the CCRU's perilous efforts to catalogue the traces of Lemurian occulture, bringing together the scattered accounts of those who had stumbled upon lagooned relics of nonhuman intelligence—a project that led ultimately to the recovery of the Numogram and the reconstruction of the principles of Lemurian time-sorcery—before disintegrating into collective schizophrenia and two decades of absolute obscurity. Meshing together fiction, number theory, voodoo, philosophy, anthropology, palate tectonics, information science, semiotics, geotraumatics, occultism, and other nameless knowledges, in these pages the incomplete evidence gathered by explorers including Burroughs, Blavatsky, Lovecraft, Jung, Barker, J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, but also the testimony of more obscure luminaries such as Echidna Stillwell, Oskar Sarkon, and Madame Centauri, are clarified and subjected to systematic investigation, comparison, and assessment so as to gauge the real stakes of the Time-War still raging behind the collapsing façade of reality. One of the most compelling and unnerving collective research enterprises to have surfaced in the twentieth century, the real pertinence of the CCRU's work is only now beginning to reveal itself to an unbelieving world. To plunge into the tangled mesh of these conspiracies, weird tales, numerical plagues, and suggestive coincidences is to test your sense of reality beyond the limits of reasonable tolerance—to enter the sphere of unbelief, where demonic currents prowl, where fictions make themselves real. Hyperstition.

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 technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices.

Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions.

A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation takes readers on a ride through time, space, and thought.

Approaching the comic medium as a supercollider for achieving maximum abstraction, in Chronosis artist Keith Tilford and philosopher Reza Negarestani create a graphically stunning and conceptually explosive universe in which the worlds of pop culture, modern art, philosophy, science fiction, and theoretical physics crash into one another.

Taking place after the catastrophic advent of the birth of time, Chronosis narrates the story of a sprawling multiverse at the center of which monazzeins, the monks of an esoteric time-cult, attempt to build bridges between the many fragmented tribes and histories of multiple possible worlds. Across a series of dizzying overlapping stories we glimpse worlds where time flows backward, where the universe can be recreated every five minutes, or where rigid facts are washed away by the tides of an infinite ocean of possibility.

A unique fusion of comics culture and philosophical cogitation, this conceptually and visually mind-expanding tale takes the reader on a dizzying rollercoaster ride through time, space, and thought.

This volume contains the entire Chronosis series in full color, along with additional background materials including early sketches, script notes, and alternative covers.