Two events with Reza Negarestani:
http://blog.urbanomic.com/cyclon/archives/2012/10/upcoming_nyc_ev.html
I will be in New York City for two upcoming events on November 15 and 18. The first one, a live collaboration with Florian Hecker. More of an abstract performance aimed at creating a synesthesiac experience of philosophy than a traditional philosophy lecture, The Non-trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal is a topological fable on the universalist philosophy of navigation and synthesis narrated in the style of Beckett. The first event also serves as an oblique introduction to the second event Abducting the Outside: Modernity and the Culture of Acceleration which will be a lecture focused on the possibility of a genuinely modern philosophy of the inhuman in the wake of an accelerated and disenthralled system of knowledge. The lecture is drawn on the works of Giuseppe Longo, Lorenzo Magnani, Gilles Chatelet and Alain Berthoz in cognitive sciences, mathematics especially the recent geometrical turn and physics accompanied with introductory commentaries on the exciting works of Gabriel Catren on anarchic constructivism and Benedict Singleton on metis intelligence.
Details and press release as follows:
Event 1: REZA NEGARESTANI & FLORIAN HECKER
The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal:
A Topological Fable on Navigation and Synthesis
Date: Thursday, November 15th, 2012
Time: 7:30 PM
Locations: Abrons’ Playhouse, 466 Grand Street, New York (at Pitt Street)
Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other. Chimerization, a recent work by Florian Hecker, uses psychoacoustics to compose such creatures from readings of a libretto penned by philosopher and novelist, Reza Negarestani.
Expanding on this work, Hecker and Negarestani come together in a live experiment – less a collaboration between philosophy and sound than a synthesis of the two. In this abstract performance, recalling Artaud’s theatre of cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives, the participating elements will be chimerized through their mutual immersion in the abyss of the universal, and thereby revealed, in turn, as nothing other than local guises of this abyssal continuum.
The performance opens (Part 1: Descent) with a theory-fiction-mathematics manifesto that introduces the dramatis personae and abruptly drops the goat of philosophy into the abyss. This prologue of a mangled philo-fiction or ‘philosophy on acid’ is followed (Part 2: Navigation) by a performative gluing of philosophy and sound in which the auditors become the goats, each completing the chimera according to their localization and navigation of the space. In the final movement (Part 3: Alienation) this personal experience of local synthesis is replaced by an estranging immersion into the impersonal experience of the global, synthetic environment as the intensifying, sonic chimerization moves beyond the sphere of the knowable.
An exercise in deregulation of the senses, this unique performance brings together two ambitious thinkers and practitioners in an experimental surgery that opens up their respective fields onto unexplored grounds.
Doors open at 7pm. Seating is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis.
For more information please contact Sequence Press, located within:
Miguel Abreu Gallery
36 Orchard Street (between Canal & Hester), New York, NY 10002
Tel 212.995.1774 • post@sequencepress.com
Issue Project Room’s Littoral Series is made possible, in part, through generous support from The Casement Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
