Archive for the ‘art’ Category
Review: Elvia Wilk’s Oval
Elvia Wilk’s novel Oval is about a green-washed near-future Berlin that moves straight into disaster without anyone seeming to notice it is too late, without anyone talking about the actual problems around them. All the characters seem too invested with a narrow vision of their immediate situations, of wondering about their social circles, with small […]
Filed under: art, feminism, literature, nature, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: berlin, design, ecofeminism, Elvia Wilk, environment, technology
Faint Cinder
Halt and Catch and Fire was one of the greatest character dramas made and no one watched it. Maybe its name scared too many away thinking it would be a smart-assed comment on technology, or another meander into 80s and 90s nostalgia. In its funny and passing moments it functioned this way but pushed far […]
Filed under: art, fantasy, feminism, film, television, video games | Leave a Comment
Tags: computer history, gaming, halt and catch fire, technology
Cyborgian Gaia
Post-apocalyptic narratives crowd current fiction, television, film, and videogames. Horizon: Zero Dawn combines two versions of these narratives and actually makes an interesting, if slightly abstract, point about anthropogenic climate change. In the game you play a young woman named Eloy who is a hunter from a matriarchal tribe. The wilderness around you is rather […]
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Tags: Borne, ecological politics, haraway, horizon zero down, jeff vandermeer
Maurizo Ferraris’ recent short text Positive Realism (Zer0, Dec 2015) attempts to define what his form of New Realism is against, and what it builds off of, engaging a wide range of philosophical positions (metaphysical realism, internal realism, scientific realism, Markus Gabriel’s New Realism, Harman’s ontology and others) while making a general claim to a philosophy […]
Filed under: art, Brassier, cognitive science, Harman, Hegel, Kant, ontology, Speculative Realism | 1 Comment
Tags: Markus Gabriel, Maurizo Ferraris, new realism, Philosophy, ray brassier, Speculative Realism, Tristan Garcia
The Present Alone is Our Sadness
For a plot summary you may go here. For another take see here. Firewatch has been generally praised as a playable narrative and less as a game. As a narrative, however, its ending has been critiqued as has the various details of its story. The supposedly anti-climatic ending is central to the theme of the […]
Filed under: art, comic books/graphic novels, film, television, trauma, video games | 1 Comment
Tags: affect, Bioshock, Firewatch, fps, William James
There’s certainly no shortage of discourse on the pseudo-ephemeral nature of money. The medieval (or even older) malleability of meaning surrounding the ledger, and of the (negative) magnitude of debt, the disentanglement of currency from its geological-metallic weight, the ever-widening role of credit, and the more recent complexities of crypto-currency and off-shore tax shelters, have […]
Filed under: art, fantasy, Freud, history, Lacan, literature, marxism, politics, psychoanalysis, Speculative Realism, Uncategorized, Zizek | Leave a Comment
Tags: art, art criticism, art theory, bataille, cryptocurrency, Goldin and Senneby, Headless, roy andersson
Updates and Announcements
Having defended my dissertation Schelling’s Naturalism: Space, Motion, and the Volition of Thought I’m now in the strange position of looking for an academic job. But, in the meantime, I thought I would give a general update. 1 – Starting the end of this month I’ll be team teaching a course on German Idealism and […]
Filed under: art, Brassier, cognitive science, Deleuze, Hegel, Iain Hamilton Grant, Kant, nature, ontology, Schelling, Speculative Realism, transcendental materialism | Leave a Comment
One of the core concepts of the neo-rationalist (and more broadly pragmatist) camp is that of boot-strapping – that certain capacities or processes, are capable of self-augmentation. While less colloquially discussed in terms of recursion (invoking a functionalist or mathematical context) boot-strapping indexes the material consequence of such activity or, in a related fashion, that […]
Filed under: art, film, Hegel, history, Iain Hamilton Grant | 4 Comments
Tags: accelerationism, Edge of Tomorrow, Looper, mark wilson, peirce, pragmatism, Primer, recursion, reza negarestani, Schelling, self-augmentation, time travel
Post-Lisbon/PAF
Being back stateside I finally have some time to reflect on some recent events in Europe. I already reported on the Berlin Summer school here but, following that, I was in Lisbon for one week for a great event organized by Margarida Mendes. The week-long summer school focused on geo-philosophy and mattering which addressed issues […]
Filed under: art, Deleuze, film, gender, Hegel, Kant, nature, politics | Leave a Comment
Tags: agi, beauty, deleuze, foucalt, freedom, inhumanism, justice, Lucca Fraser, pete wolfendale, reza negarestani, spinzoa
Naught Thought 