Urbanomic

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May 31, 2008

Party at last!

UMELEC - Magazine of the Art Dead
and
COLLAPSE - Journal of Philosophical Research and Development
invite you to celebrate the publication of Umelec 1/2008 and Collapse Volume IV
* CONCEPT HORROR *
showing original works from COLLAPSE IV by JAKE AND DINOS CHAPMAN, KEITH TILFORD, KRISTEN ALVANSON, CHINA MIEVILLE, TODOSCH, RAFANI, and more...
with live experimental grime noise from the mighty PATRICIDE
[horror-customised patricide visuals will feature live+direct viditext shoutouts on 0775 4908051 - get it on speed dial now!]
on SATURDAY 7th JUNE, from 6pm (Noise begins at 8.30).
at Divus Unit 30, Shoreditch.

On sale will be original work by Keith Tilford (including the cover image of Collapse IV), Todosch, Rafani, and signed China Mieville Skulltopus prints! If you're interested but can't make it on the night, please mail us. The works will be exhibited at DIVUS until Thursday June 19 inclusive.

Please forward this message on, copy to blogs, etc.

Unit no.30
3rd Floor
North Entrance
37 Cremer Street
Shoreditch
London
E2 8HD
10 Mins from Old St. Tube
0207 7398993

On 21 June the party happens again at Urbanomic's new home at The Old Lemonade Factory in Falmouth.

best wishes,
Urbanomic

http://www.divus.cz/umelec/
http://www.urbanomic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/killyourfather

May 30, 2008

Arbeit McFries

Collapse IV contributors Jake and Dinos Chapman's new show If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be opened last night at the White Cube (Mason's Yard) in London, continuing until 12 July. The show includes two new collections of 'rectified' paintings, and Fucking Hell, an awesome expanded remake of Hell, the work toasted in Saatchi's warehouse fire.
The accompanying catalogue includes an essay by Collapse editor Robin Mackay.

May 25, 2008

MONU

MONU - magazine on urbanism is a unique bi-annual international forum for artists, writers and designers that are working on topics of urban culture, development and politics. Each issue collects essays, projects and photographs from contributors from all over the world to a given topic. Thus MONU examines topics that are important to the future of our cities and urban regions from a variety of perspectives.
MONU is produced and published by the Rotterdam based Bureau of Architecture, Research and Design (www.b-o-a-r-d.nl), headed by Bernd Upmeyer.

The current issue is on Border Urbanism.

Collapse Presentation at iRes

On Wednesday 4th June, Collapse editor Robin Mackay will be giving a presentation in the series lab_Off Centre at iRes (Research in Interactive Art and Design) at University College Falmouth.

lab_Off Centre is a series of events organised by iRes at University College Falmouth. Theorists, artists, philosophers, curators and others are invited to present their research and art projects which take place or/and consider the periphery in various dimensions. All the events are open to the public and are organised irregularly as informal discussions, workshops and presentations. To read more about lab_Off Centre go here.

Collapse IV - Subs, Orders, Retail

Collapse IV is now available in the following bookstores:

- The exquisite Bookartbookshop on Pitfield Street (Old Street tube, nr. Hoxton Sq.), London, which stocks a multitude of small press items, artist's books and other non-mainstream publications, and which is well worth a visit;

- Tate Modern, London;

- ICA, London;

- Vrin, place de la Sorbonne, Paris;

- Buchhandlung Walther König, Ehrenstrasse, Köln;

We are actively seeking new outlets, and hope to soon have copies available in several stores in Canada and the US, and in Berlin. Please email us with any leads on stores elsewhere who may be interested in stocking Collapse.

Meanwhile, all advance orders and subscribtion copies of Collapse were mailed out last week and should be reaching you soon - please let us know if you don't receive your copy.

May 15, 2008

Collapse IV 'Concept Horror'

Collapse Volume IV: 'Concept Horror' is now available for sale online. This volume is published as a limited edition of 1000 copies only.

Contributors to the volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse's pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of the primacy of victimhood for the affect of horror, tracing its origins to the Zoroastrian concept of Druj.

In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti's anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book Being No-One: namely, that 'nobody ever was or had a self'.

In Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, Thinking Horror (an extract from his forthcoming non-fiction work The Conspiracy Against the Human Race), he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of pessimistic thought.

As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Oleg Kulik, the internationally-acclaimed Russian contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series Memento Mori: Dead Monkeys.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the way in which a certain horror has perenially accompanied the concept of 'life', from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his evocation of the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld contribute a set of drawings created exclusively for Collapse. The cartoon-horror of I Can See continues their investigations into the connection between laughter and horror through the programmatic impoverishment of the aesthetic.

In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Quentin Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous, as demonstrated in Alvanson's diagrammatic presentation of the Arbor Deformia.

German artist Todosch's meticulous drawings seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation, making them a perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of nineteenth-century naturephilosopher Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In The Corpse Bride:Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

Canadian artist Steven Shearer contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, interrogating the dyad of the weird and the hauntological, and introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal ... behold the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit.

Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images, deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp', anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay, D. Veal // May 2008 // 406pp // Limited Edition 1000 copies // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Full Contents:

Robin Mackay - Editorial Introduction (Downloadable as PDF)

George Sieg - Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror: The Gnosis of the Victim

Eugene Thacker - Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror

Rafani - Czech Forest

China Miéville - M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire: Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?

Reza Negarestani - The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Nigredo

Jake and Dinos Chapman - I Can See

Michel Houellebecq - Poems

James Trafford - The Shadow of a Puppet Dance: Metzinger, Ligotti and the Illusion of Selfhood

Thomas Ligotti / Oleg Kulik - Thinking Horror / 'Memento Mori' - Dead Monkeys

Quentin Meillassoux - Spectral Dilemma

Benjamin Noys - Horror Temporis

Iain Hamilton Grant / Todosch - Being and Slime: The Mathematics of Protoplasm in Lorenz Oken's 'Physio-Philosophy' / Drawings

Steven Shearer - Poems

Graham Harman / Keith Tilford - On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl /
Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo

Kristen Alvanson - Arbor Deformia

Notes on Contributors and Acknowledgements

May 13, 2008

Kristen Alvanson (contributor to Collapse II and IV)

Kristen Alvanson's upcoming exhibition in Tehran:

nonad

Two nomadic fabric chadors - blue (2007) and pewter (2008)

Azad Gallery is pleased to present nonad (of nines and nomads), a solo exhibition by the Iran-based American artist Kristen Alvanson, opening Friday, May 23. In Alvanson's first Tehran exhibition, a western artist reanimates her artistic experiments with an entirely new arsenal of conceptual and material resources.

Since leaving New York, Alvanson has explored the threefold of textiles, women, and the Middle East in all its formations, anomalies, enigmas, political speculations, and aesthetic conjectures. Her new work includes nomadic fabric chador (Persian veil) sculptures, abjad-9 drawings, and an animation from her Cosmic Drapery Project.

For the exhibition, Azad Gallery is transformed into a garden of hanging folds. Nine colorful chadors are hung throughout the gallery. As viewers weave through and interact with the installation, they discover implicit sociopolitical structures of these nomadic fabric sculptures as well as their nomadic persuasions in regard to art and creativity. At 350 cm x 190 cm, each chador contains nine panels, six made of different nomadic fabrics. The rest contain black fabric, the same fabric used for traditional back chadors.

On surrounding walls, the Abjad-9 drawings suggest collective shapes vaguely reminiscent of the patterns of traditional Islamic art. Drawn in Persian ink and calligraphic pen, the drawings reveal the affect space between women in veil or chador, and the forces, folds and movements between them. These elaborately nested structures include half-elliptical shapes, the shape of a Persian veil when fully spread out. These shapes represent women in chador as seen from above.

The animation ninefold is a further visualization of these complex, subterranean relationships and spaces. Like the chadors and the Abjad-9 drawings, it is structured by the number 9, standing for the occluded relations between textiles, women, and the Middle East. In Middle Eastern occult, nine is the number of unceasing collectivity - worlds created through the hidden bonds of spells and collective tides.

Alvanson's ongoing Cosmic Drapery Project is an exploration of the enigma of the Middle East through its drapery. It is nurtured by the history of textiles in the Middle East. This history includes clashes and secret dialogues between state and nomad art, their folk beliefs, textiles and modes of creativity.

Alvanson's nomadic fabric chadors explore the interactions between black and nomadic fabrics. These include the differences and compatibilities between patterns, textures, and weight; explicit folding lines; and the distribution of sequins. The potentials inherent in each fabric emerge as islands of alliance or as folds of opposition between state and nomadic art in the Middle East.

For more information visit Alvanson's website at www.kristenalvanson.com.
Azad Gallery | No. 41, Salmas Sq., Golha Sq. | Tehran, Iran | +98 21 88008676

May 06, 2008

Affiches

Des affiches en français pour Collapse IV : ici.

May 01, 2008

Collapse IV update

Owing to the usual last-minute delays, Collapse IV is likely to be available around the 15th May - but will most definitely be worth the wait. Many thanks for the votes of confidence of the many who have already ordered their copies in advance.

The introduction to the volume is available as a PDF preview from the downloads page. While you're there, why not download and print a flyer too...

Full Contents:

Robin Mackay - Editorial Introduction